Fossil Huntress — Palaeo Sommelier

Brachiopods, sharks, crocodiles, coelacanth, ginko, horsetails and velvet works are all considered Living Fossils. We'll talk about those species and others on today's cast. Living Fossils are an interesting area in palaeontology.  Today's episode was spurred by Sayre Morgan who asks the question, "if brachiopods are technically still alive today and look similar. And we can recognize them in...

Woolly Mammoths were true elephants, unlike their less robust cousins, the mastodons. Mammoths were bigger — both in girth and height — weighing in at a max of 13 tonnes. They are closely related to Asian elephants and were about the size of the African elephants you see roaming the grasslands of Africa today. Their size offered protection against other predators once the mammoth was full grown. S...

Lemurs are mammals of the order Primates, divided into 8 families and consisting of 15 genera and around 100 highly diverse species — 105 to be exact. They are native only to the island of Madagascar. Most lemurs are relatively small, have a pointed snout, large eyes, and a long tail. They are arboreal, living primarily in trees and nocturnal, preferring to be active at night, snacking on lea...

One hundred and seventy million years ago, Madagascar was landlocked in the middle of the supercontinent Gondwana, sandwiched between land that would eventually become South America and Africa and land that would eventually become India, Australia, and Antarctica. Riding the movements of the Earth's crust, Madagascar, along with India, first split from Africa and South America ... and then from Au...

An Eocene Cryptodiran Fossil Turtle, Baena arenosa , from fine-grained lime mud outcrops in the Green River Formation, Wyoming, USA. This fellow, with the extra-long tail, marks the last of his lineage. The now extinct family Baenidae appeared first in the Jurassic and died out at the end of the Eocene. We've found specimens of Baena , along with 14 other species of turtles in seven genera and fiv...

The Green River Formation is a series of Eocene outcrops with outstanding preservation. Here we see the species that lived and died then fossilized within the sediments at the bottom of intermountain lakes in three basins along the present-day Green River in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. 

John Leahy & Dave Langevin worked up at the McAbee Fossil Beds for more than two decades. Together they opened up the site and our understanding of British Columbia during the Eocene. Both have passed away now but their collection of more than 18,000 specimens were donated to the Royal British Columbia Museum. Their contribution to science and generosity of spirit do them credit.  John wa...

The McAbee Fossil Beds are known for their incredible abundance, diversity and quality of fossils including lovely plant, insect and fish species that lived in an old lake bed setting 52-53 million years ago. The fossils are preserved here as impressions and carbonaceous films. We see gymnosperm (16 species); a variety of conifers (14 species to my knowledge); two species of ginkgo, a large variet...

The Hallstatt Limestone is the world's richest Triassic ammonite unit, yielding specimens of more than 500 ammonite species. Along with diversified cephalopod fauna  — orthoceratids, nautiloids, ammonoids — we also see gastropods, bivalves, brachiopods, crinoids and a few corals. The salt-named town of Hallstatt sits on the shores of the idyllic Hallstätter Sea at the base of the Dachste...

There was a large downpour that hit Washington State causing massive slides. The blocks you see here all came crashing down on the hillside. Once the skies cleared, hikers found plant impressions in the rock and alerted the local palaeo community. I was invited to visit just after the slide to photograph the site while George Mustoe took moulds of the palm trunks and trackways. The slide site at S...

Ktunaxa people have occupied the lands adjacent to the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers and the Arrow Lakes of British Columbia, Canada for more than 10,000 years. On their land sits one of the outcrops of the Eager Formation, a site half a billion years old with beautifully preserved trilobites. The Ktunaxa have done a wonderful job — both in choosing this beautiful part of the world to call their ho...

In May 2001, Dr. Ted Danner, Professor Emeritus from UBC and my mentor gave a talk to the Vancouver Paleontological Society. For over fifteen years, we would meet for dinner on the third Thursday of every month. I would swing by to pick him up and we would head to his favourite restaurant for dinner. Dinner was a delight of banter, stories and paleontological debate. Dr. Danner had a keen mind and...

The Gulf Islands in British Columbia include Mayne, Galiano, Hornby, and Gabriola. The largest is Salt Spring, famed for its locavore-minded farmers, artisan producers, and organic vineyards. Wildlife, nature, coastal activities, and getting away from the hubbub are top reasons to visit.

Many land animals have returned to the sea throughout evolutionary history. We have beautifully documented cases from amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals from over 30 different lineages over the past 250 million years. Our dear penguins, seals, sea lions, walruses, whales, crocodiles and sea turtles were once entirely terrestrial. Some species dipped a toe or two into freshwater ponds, but mak...

Pterosaurs were flying reptiles of the extinct clade or order Pterosauria. They soared our ancient skies during most of the Mesozoic — from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous (228 to 66 million years ago). By the end of the Cretaceous, they had grown to giants and one of their brethren, Quetzalcoatlus , a member of the family Azhdarchidae, boasts being the largest known flying animal t...

Back in the Triassic, 290-210 million years ago, massive marine reptiles — the ichthyosaurs — hunted in the shallow sea that blanketed what would become Nevada We find them now as fossils embedded in the Earth. The quality of preservation at localities like Fossil Hill in the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada, perhaps the most famous and important locality for the Middle Triassic (Anisian/Ladinian) of...

Steeped in mist and mythology, the islands of Haida Gwaii abound in local lore that surrounds their beginnings. Today, the Hecate Strait is a tempestuous 40-mile wide channel that separates the mist-shrouded archipelago of Haida Gwaii from the BC mainland. Haida First Nation oral tradition tells of a time when the strait was mostly dry, dotted here and there with lakes. During the last ice age, gl...

A mighty marine reptile was excavated on the Trent River near Courtenay on the east coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada in August 2020. The excavation is the culmination of a three-year palaeontological puzzle. The fossil remains are those of a plesiosaur — 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 Blue Lias is a geological formation in southern, eastern and western England and parts of South Wales, part of the Lias Group. The Blue Lias consists of a sequence of limestone and shale layers, laid down in latest Triassic and early Jurassic times, between 195 and 200 million years ago. Many wonderful ichthyosaur fossils have been found here along with theropods and pterosaurs. 

A warm welcome to all of you and thank you for listening to the Fossil Huntress Podcast. We've just crossed over the one month mark and I wanted to say a heartfelt thank you and introduce you to each other. It is exciting to share my passion for palaeo in wee bite-size bits with you. It is truly wonderful to know that you share my interest in rocks and fossils — and with so many great folk around...

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. 

The Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds now sit in the Main Ranges of the Rockies but were once at the bottom of shallow sea beds down near the edge of ancestral North America. Today, these outcrops in Yoho National Park contain wonderful Cambrian fossil goodies including the predator Anomalocaris canadensis; Trilobite species: Ogygopsis klotzi, Olenoides serratus and Elrathina Cordillerae; as well as, b...

Come and explore one of British Columbia's most intriguing fossil localities — the Burgess Shale. This amazing window into our ancient seas was found quite by accident and over the past 100 years has given us one of the best windows to view the Cambrian Explosion

The Fossil Birds of the Jehol Biota have caused an international stir amongst palaeontologists. The Jehol outcrops of northeastern China has unearthed some of the most important Mesozoic bird specimens worldwide over the past two decades. This is a tale of how that all began.

There are two species of Keuppia, Keuppia hyperbolaris and Keuppia levante, both of which we find as fossils. We find their remains, along with those of the genus Styletoctopus, in Cretaceous-age Hâqel and Hjoula localities in Lebanon. For many years, Palaeoctopus newboldi (Woodward, 1896) from the Santonian limestones at Sâhel Aalma, Lebanon, was the only known pre‐Cenozoic coleoid cephalopod bel...