Fossil Huntress — Palaeo Sommelier

Extinct Giants: The Woolly Mammoths. These massive beasts roamed the icy cold tundra of Europe, Asia, and North America from about 300,000 years ago up until about 10,000 years ago making a living by digging through the snow and ice to get to the tough grasses beneath. The last known group of woolly mammoths survived until about 1650 B.C.—over a thousand years after the Pyramids at Giza were built...

Learn all about the gear you might need out in the field fossil collecting. What you'll need depends on where you collect and what time of year you go but this will get you started and set up for success.

Join in for a chilly visit to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard between mainland Norway and the North Pole. This one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas with rugged terrain, glaciers and polar bear. The rocks here house beautiful Triassic ammonoids, bivalves and primitive ichthyosaurs. To see some of the fossils from here, visit: https://fossilhuntress.blogspot.com/2020/12/ammonoids-an...

Joe Moysiuk is a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, with research interests in macroevolution, evolutionary developmental biology, and the origin of animal life. He has extensive experience with fossils from the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada, one of the world’s most significant fossil sites. As part of his continuum of Burgess Shale-related research, he is currently pursuing a...

Welcome to Season Seven of the Fossil Huntress Podcast. In this episode you’ll hear about the many yummy fossil projects and field trips over the past few months including a trip to Vancouver Island’s Wild West Coast, great talks & a TV project.

Kirk Johnson is a geologist, paleobotanist, and the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. His research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of the dinosaurs, and he is known for his scientific articles, popular books, museum exhibitions, documentaries, and collaborations with artists.   Bright, funny and a delightful human being, Kirk Johnson is a...

2022 Palaeontology / Paleontology Lecture Series with all of you.  Zoom Link: www.fossiltalksandfieldtrips.com SPRING 2022 Kicking off 2022 is Danna Staaf, the Cephalopodiatrist with Cephalopods are the New Dinosaurs, Sun, February 12, 2022 at 2PM PST. Cephalopods, Earth's first truly substantial animals, are still among us. Their fascinating family tree is a whose-who of squid, octopus, cutt...

The Rocky Mountain Trench is one of the few geologic wonders we can see from space. It is known as the Valley of a Thousand Peaks or simply the Trench — a large valley on the western side of the northern part of North America's Rocky Mountains.

A mighty marine reptile was excavated on the Trent River near Courtenay on the east coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The excavation is the culmination of a three-year palaeontological puzzle. The fossil remains are those of an elasmosaur — a group of long-necked marine reptiles found in the Late Triassic to the Late Cretaceous some 215 to 80 million years ago. In the case of th...

Nothing says Happy 2022 like free prizes. Thank you to each and every one of you who spent time with me in 2021. It is time to wrap up the year and welcome in 2022. I wish you health, happiness and many fossils.... perhaps as prizes. That's right. It is time to celebrate you! We're starting off 2022 with some great giveaways. Head on over to the ARCHEA YouTube Channel to learn how you could add a...

Love the Wild: Moose. One of the most impressive mammals of the Pacific Northwest and the largest living member of the deer family are Moose. They are taller than everyone you know and weighs more than your car. You may encounter them lumbering solo along the edge of rivers and lakes, taking a refreshing swim or happily snacking on short grasses, water plants, woody shrubs and pinecones. You can o...

Fossil Field Trip to the Cretaceous Capilano Three Brothers Formation — Vancouver has a spectacular mix of mountains, forests, lowlands, inlets and rivers all wrapped lovingly by the deep blue of the Salish Sea. When we look to the North Shore, the backdrop is made more spectacular by the Coast Mountains with a wee bit of the Cascades tucked in behind. If you were standing on the top of the Lion's...

The islands have gone by many names. To the people who call the islands home, Haida Gwaii means Island of the People , it is a shortened version of an earlier name, Haadala Gwaii-ai, or taken out of concealment. Back at the time of Nangkilslas, it was called Didakwaa Gwaii , or “shoreward country.” By any name, the islands are a place of beauty and spirit and enjoy a special place in both the natu...

Fly with me over to Austria in Europe to visit the Hallstatt Limestones. These are the world's richest Triassic ammonite outcrops. Along with diversified cephalopod fauna  — orthoceratids, nautiloids, ammonoids — we also see gastropods, bivalves, especially the late Triassic pteriid bivalve Halobia (the halobiids), brachiopods, crinoids and a few corals. We also see a lovely selection of...

Fossil Collecting in the islands of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada. The mist-shrouded islands of Haida Gwaii are at the western edge of the continental shelf and form part of Wrangellia, an exotic terrane of former island arcs, which also includes Vancouver Island, parts of western mainland British Columbia and southern Alaska. This is a trip that takes some level of planning but is well-wo...

If you are planning a fossil field trip to Harrison Lake, this is the episode for you! We'll talk about getting there. What to bring and what you'll find.  Drive the 30 km up Forestry Road #17, stopping just past Hale Creek at 49.5° N, 121.9° W: paleo-coordinates 42.5° N, 63.4° W, on the west side of Harrison Lake. You'll see Long Island to your right. The first of the yummy fossil exposures...

Welcome to Season Five of the Fossil Huntress Podcast. If you love palaeontology, you will love this stream. Ammonites, trilobites, you’ll find them all here. Think of it as dead sexy science for your ears. Have a listen!

Visiting the Great Bear Rainforest takes planning and is well worth the trip. You will want to book a guide to lead you through this 6.4 million hectare wilderness on British Columbia's north and central coasts. I recommend searching www.indigenousbc.com for some wonderful knowledgeable First Nation partners on your excursion. This is a journey, an experience you will never forget, so savour every...

In the late 1930s, our understanding of the transition of fish to tetrapods — and the eventual jump to modern vertebrates — took an unexpected leap forward. The evolutionary a'ha came from a single partial fossil skull found on the shores of a riverbank in Eastern Canada.  Meet the Stegocephalian, Elpistostege watsoni, an extinct genus of finned tetrapodomorphs that lived during the Late...

The Oregon Coast on the western edge of the USA is a wonderful place to collect fossils. The area has been known for its wonderful fossil fauna since the 1830s. Here we find middle Miocene (along with a wee bit of Eocene) outcrops with delicious fossil whale bone, fish teeth, turtle shell, and a magnificent assortment of molluscs — the gastropods Chlorostome pacificum, Turritella oregonensis, Crep...

High up in the Canadian Rocky Mountains there are mysteries more than half a billion years old. These are the outcrops of the Burgess Shale Biota — more than 150 species that provide a window into life in our Cambrian seas. Charles Doolittle Walcott will be forever remembered for his extraordinary discovery of the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of Yoho National Park in southeastern British Columbia...

Gentoo Penguins with their black, white natural colouring akin to formal wear — are some of my favourite animals. They are foraging predators — dining on crustaceans, fish and squid in the cold nearshore waters of the Antarctic Peninsula, Falkland Islands, South Georgia and Sandwich Islands. South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands and the Falklands are inhospitable British Overseas Territories i...

We owe a huge nod of gratitude to the wee photosynthetic microbes known as cyanobacteria for their work in helping to create the first oxygen to enter our atmosphere and make you and I — & indeed all life on Earth — possible. When the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was an inhospitable place. Even with a Sun some 25 per cent weaker than it is today, ours was a molten world that needed t...

When I was little, maybe 5 or 6 years old, I struck gold! Well, it wasn't real gold, but I was most convinced. Someone had dumped a tailings pile near the woods where I lived and in the sun, those crushed pieces of rock sparkled. I had already been bitten by the love of minerals and fossils and so naturally I filled my pockets and brought as much home as a youngster can carry. Where I was told tha...

One of the most delightful palaeontologists to grace our Earth was José Fernando Bonaparte (14 June 1928 – 18 February 2020). He was an Argentinian paleontologist who you'll know as the discoverer of some of Argentina's iconic dinosaurs — Carnotaurus (the "Bull" dinosaur we've talked about in a previous episode), along with Amargasaurus, Abelisaurus, Argentinosaurus and Noasa...