FOSSILS, TEXTILES AND URINE

Yorkshire Coast

You may recall the eight-metre Type Specimen of the ichthyosaur, Temnodontosaurus crassimanus, found in an alum quarry in Yorkshire, northern England.

The Yorkshire Museum was given this important ichthyosaur fossil back in 1857 when alum production was still a necessary staple of the textile industry. Without that industry, many wonderful specimens would likely never have been unearthed.

These quarries are an interesting bit of British history as they helped shape the Yorkshire Coast, created an entirely new industry and gave us more than a fixative for dyes. With them came the discovery of many remarkable fossil specimens and, oddly, local employment in the collection of urine.

In the 16th century, alum was essential in the textile industry as a fixative for dyes. 

By the first half of the 16th century, the clothing of the Low Countries, German states, and Scandinavia had developed in a different direction than that of England, France, and Italy, although all absorbed the sobering and formal influence of Spanish dress after the mid-1520s. Those fashions held true until the Inquisition when religious persecution, politics and fashion underwent a much-needed overhaul to something lighter.

Fashion in Medieval Livonia (1521): Albrecht Dürer

Elaborate slashing was popular, especially in Germany. In the depiction you see here, an artist pokes a bit of fun at Germanic fashion from the time. Bobbin lace arose from passementerie in the mid-16th century in Flanders, the Flemish Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium. Black was increasingly worn for the most formal occasions.

This century saw the rise of the ruff, which grew from a mere ruffle at the neckline to immense, slightly silly, cartwheel shapes. They adorned the necklines of the ultra-wealthy and uber-stylish men and women of the age.

At their most extravagant, ruffs required wire supports and were made of fine Italian reticella, a cutwork linen lace.

16th Century Fashion / Ruff Collars and Finery

In contrast to all that ruff, lace and cutwork linen, folk needed dyed fabrics. And to fix those dyes, they needed Alum. For a time, Italy was the source of that alum.

The Pope held a tidy monopoly on the industry, supplying both alum and the best dyes. He also did a nice trade in the colourful and rare pigments for painting. And for a time, all was well with dandy's strutting their finery to the local fops in Britain.

All that changed during the Reformation. Great Britain, heathens as they were, were cut-off from their Papal source and found themselves needing to fend for themselves.

The good Thomas Challoner took up the charge and set up Britain's first Alum works in Guisborough. Challoner looked to paleontology for inspiration. Noticing that the fossils found on the Yorkshire coast were very similar to those found in the Alum quarries in Europe, he hatched a plan to set-up an alum industry on home soil. As the industry grew, sites along the coast were favoured as access to the shales and subsequent transportation was much easier.

Alum House, Photo: Joyce Dobson and Keith Bowers

Alum was extracted from quarried shales through a large scale and complicated process which took months to complete. The process involved extracting then burning huge piles of shale for 9 months, before transferring it to leaching pits to extract an aluminum sulphate liquor. This was sent along channels to the alum works where human urine was added.

At the peak of alum production, the industry required 200 tonnes of urine every year. That's the equivalent of all the potty visits of more than 1,000 people. Yes, strange but true.

The steady demand was hard to keep up with and urine became an imported resource from markets as far away as London and Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England. Wooden buckets were left on street corners for folk to do their business then carted back to the south to complete the alum extraction process. The urine and alum would be mixed into a thick liquid. Once mixed, the aromatic slosh was left to settle and then the alum crystals were removed.

I'm not sure if this is a folktale or plain truth, but as the story goes, one knows when the optimum amount of alum had been extracted as you can pop an egg in the bucket and it floats on its own.

Alum House. Photo: Ann Wedgewood and Keith Bowers

The last Alum works on the Yorkshire Coast closed in 1871. This was due to the invention of manufacturing synthetic alum in 1855, then subsequently the creation of aniline dyes that contained their own fixative.

There are many sites along the Yorkshire Coast which bear evidence of the alum industry. These include Loftus Alum Quarries where the cliff profile is drastically changed by extraction and huge shale tips remain.

Further South are the Ravenscar Alum Works, which are well preserved and enable visitors to visualize the processes which took place. The photos you see here are of Alum House at Hummersea. The first shows the ruin of Alum House printed on a postcard from 1906. The second (bottom) image shows the same ruin from on high with Cattersty Point in the background.

The good folk at the National Trust in Swindon are to thank for much of the background shared here. If you'd like to learn more about the Yorkshire area or donate to a very worthy charity, follow their link below.

Reference: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/yorkshire-coast/features/how-alum-shaped-the-yorkshire-coast

TEMNODONTOSAURUS CRASSIMANUS

Temnodontosaurus crassimanus

This big beastie is the ichthyosaur, Temnodontosaurus crassimanus, who graced our ancient oceans 180 million years ago. The species was originally named by Richard Owen, the first superintendent of the Natural History Museum. Owen lived at the height of the gentleman scientist and it was Owen who first coined the name dinosaur. Dean Lomax did some work with this specimen as part of his research leading up to his PhD.

The fellow you see here is the Type Specimen for the species and he lives on display in the Yorkshire Museum. As the reference specimen for the species, all hopeful specimens that may belong to this species are checked against the Type Specimen to see if they share diagnostic features.

The Yorkshire Museum was given this important ichthyosaur fossil back in 1857, albeit in bits and pieces. The first bits of fossil bones were found near Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast by workmen quarrying alum. They recognized the bones as belonging to a fossilized reptile and alerted local authorities who in turn alerted the good Master Owen.

It was quite an undertaking to recover as it was found in more than fifty pieces in massive shale blocks and the alum quarry was active at the time. Alum quarrying helped share the Yorkshire Coast as an important staple of the textile industry going back to the 16th-century. By the 1860s, alum quarrying was slowing down. The ability to manufacture synthetic alum by 1855 had shifted the industry and it died out entirely by 1871. Lucky for us, the last years of alum production gifted us this well-preserved eight-metre specimen, one of the largest ichthyosaurs ever discovered in the UK.

Paleo-coordinates: 54.5° N, 0.6° W: paleocoordinates 42.4° N, 9.3° E

CAMBRIAN MYSTERIES OF THE CANADIAN ROCKIES

Mount Stephen, Canadian Rockies

High up on the mountain tops of the Canadian Rockies of southeastern British Columbia — on the western edge of Western Canada's Sedimentary Basin — there are mysteries more than half a billion years old. 

Here, for more than a century, palaeontologists have been exploring over a dozen geologic outcrops that speak of a world when arthropods ruled the seas. 

The rocks we walk across are made of shale, thin-bedded limestone, and siltstone deposited during the Middle Cambrian — 513 to 497 million years ago. And these are no ordinary rocks for what they contain — exceptionally preserved soft-bodied fossils of the Burgess Shale biota. 

Charles Doolittle Walcott will be forever remembered for his extraordinary 1909 discovery of the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of Yoho National Park in southern British Columbia — delivering to the world one of the most important biota of soft-bodied organisms in the fossil record. Here we find a fairly complete look at an ancient ecosystem with algae, grazers and filter feeders, scavengers and active predators. Remarkably, soft-bodied organisms make up 98% of individuals and 85% of the genera. These animals lived and died in the deep waters at the base of what would later become the Cathedral Escarpment.

In 1908, Walcott wrote, "Nearly every fragment of shale found on the slopes from 2000 to 2600 feet above Field has fossils upon it; not only fragments but usually entire specimens of trilobites.” It was for this reason he returned the following year to collect and the rest, as they say, is history.

The sheer volume and level of preservation were unknown at the time. Walcott's material came from a single section on the west side of the ridge between Mount Wapta and Mount Field and was collected from the main quarry in the Phyllopod bed and the smaller Raymond quarry some 23 m above. 

The Burgess Shale section occurs in the lower two-thirds of the Stephen Formation where the basinal shales abut against the steep face of the adjacent dolomite reef of the Cathedral Formation. The conditions necessary for the preservation of the soft parts of the organisms appear to have been controlled by the proximity of this reef front. Away from the reef front, exceptional preservation is less common.

A view to Mount Stephen, Canadian Rockies

The Burgess Shale was long considered to be a unique occurrence. Then in 1977, Canadian geologist, Ian McIlreath, found that the Cathedral Escarpment or reef front, could be traced for about 20 km southeast of Walcott's quarry and that the contact between the reef and basinal shales cropped out again on Mount Field, Mount Stephen, Mount Odaray, Park Mountain and Curtis Peak. 

Des Collins speculated that more localities of soft-bodied fossils might be found in the basinal shales near these contacts, and, indeed, a few indications were later reported by Aitken and McIlreath (1981) along the line of the Escarpment. 

In 1981 and 1982, we expanded our knowledge of the region. Des Collins and others organized fieldwork that led to the discovery of about a dozen new localities, which Collins et al. published in 1983.

The most promising of the new localities occurred in a large in situ block of pale grey-blue siliceous shale about 1500 m southwest of the outcrop of the Cathedral Escarpment on the north shoulder of Mount Stephen. 

This is about 5 km almost directly south of the Burgess Shale quarries. The site was excavated by a Royal Ontario Museum party in the summer of 1983. Further fieldwork in 1986 led to the discovery of the arthropod Sanctacaris was first described by Briggs and Collins in 1988. 

Sanctacaris uncata, Mount Stephen Fossil Beds

The stratigraphic level where the block occurred is characterized by the trilobite, Glossopleura, which is the local zone fossil for the basal part of the basinal Stephen Formation (Fritz, 1971). 

In the Stephen Formation section of about 1000 m to the north on Mount Stephen measured by Fritz, the top of the Glossopleura Zone is 40 m below the level equivalent to the main Burgess Shale quarry. 

The block excavated was at least 40 m below the top of the Glossopleura Zone. This puts it 80 m or more stratigraphically below the level of the Burgess Shale Phyllopod bed.

The faunal assemblage from the block is dominated by the arthropods, Alalcomenaeua and Branchiocaris, which are very rare in the Burgess Shale. Many other Burgess Shale animals were found (Collins et al. 1983) but surprisingly not the most common — Marrella. They did find many new forms and published their finds in 1986 (Collins, 1986). By all accounts, this fauna is distinct from those in the Burgess Shale — and a shade older. 

But as we learn and gain insight, we also realize how much we have yet to learn. These outcrops help us to gain an understanding of the biology, ecology, diversity and evolution of Cambrian animals in a way that other Cambrian sites cannot. Without this insight, we would have a very limited view of the Cambrian Explosion and see only the shelly fossil assemblages. The unique conditions in the Burgess Shale record species that under typical circumstances, would never have fossilized and would be lost to us forever.

There has been no end of mysteries and riddles to be solved in the designating and correlating units within the Stephen Formation, Burgess Shale Formation, and the Cathedral Formation. Much of the controversy stems from the extensive faulting in the area and especially from environmental (facies) differences between the stratigraphic units. 

There are shelf platform sequences that include shallow water inner detrital belt, middle carbonate belt, and carbonate shelf edge facies, as well as deeper water (basinal) outer detrital belt facies. These have all have posed problems in correlation and descriptions of the formations in the area.

What used to be known as the Stephen Formation is now restricted to what was known as the "thin" Stephen Formation. The Stephen Formation now includes the Narao and Wapituk Members. What was formerly the "thick" Stephen Formation (basinal Stephen) is now called the Burgess Shale Formation. 

Pirania sp., extinct sea sponges, Burgess Shale

This formation comprises units that include the classic Burgess Shale localities (Walcott Quarry (including the "phyllopod bed"), Raymond Quarry), the Mt. Stephen Trilobite Beds, as well as most of the soft-bodied faunas (Collins Quarry, S7, Ehmaniella Zone faunas, etc.).

The Burgess Shale is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Burgess Shale and Stephen Formations outcrop mainly in Banff and Yoho National Parks in the Alberta-British Columbia border area. All known outcrops are in Canada's Rocky Mountain Parks, so collecting is strictly forbidden. 

While you cannot collect in the parks, you can join in on a guided tour to hike, explore, capturing the beautiful scenery and fossils with your camera and through rubbings. If you fancy a hike to these exalted cliffs, follow the link below.

If an armchair visit is more your thing, pick up a copy of, A Geoscience Guide To The Burgess Shale. This illustrated guide immerses the reader in the history, geology, environment and, most importantly, fossils of the Burgess Shale in an easy-to-read, concise summary of life as it was over 500 million years ago. Excellent colour images of 3D interpretations of the organisms and photos of the fossils make this resource a must-have for anyone interested in the Burgess Shale. 

Burgess Shale Hikes: https://www.burgess-shale.bc.ca/burgess-shale-hikes/  / Toll free: 1 (800) 343-3006; Tel: 1 (250) 343-6006; Email: info@burgess-shale.bc.ca

A Burgess Shale Primer: History, Geology and Research Highlights; Jean-Bernard Caron & Dave Rudkin: https://www.rom.on.ca/sites/default/files/imce/burgess_shale_primer.pdf

References: Palaeontology, Vol 31, Part 3. 1988, pp 779-798, pls 71-73) was discovered by Collins (1986),http://palaeontology.palass-pubs.org/pdf/Vol 31/Pages 779-798.pdf

Image: Reconstruction of Sanctacaris uncata, a Cambrian Habeliidan arthropod (stem-Chelicerata: Habeliida). by Junnn11 @ni075; Pirania sp. & photos: @Fossil Huntress

IN PRAISE OF FOSSIL LAGERSTÄTTEN

A Lagerstätte is a sedimentary deposit with extraordinary fossils with exceptional preservation — sometimes preserving soft tissues when we are very lucky. 

When you see a specimen and it makes you go 'whoah' — that is a good indication that you are likely seeing one of the wonderfully preserved goodies from these marvellous sites.

There are about 50 sites we collectively describe as Lagerstätten — though there are many more sites that could reasonably be argued for — and they are. The list below gives you a place to start but it is by no means exhaustive and will grow as more sites are found and explored.

If you are curious about checking out these wonderfully preserved sites, pay a visit to @FossilBonanza, the Twitter home of Andy, an educator at NHMU. On both his @FossilBonanza Twitter stream and his podcast of the same name, Andy gushes about Lagerstätten from around the globe.

He's also created a rather clever interactive map of the world’s Lagerstätten divided by time period. You can visit here: https://maphub.net/FossilBonanza/Lagerstatte. To listen to the Fossil Bonanza Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../fossil-bonanza/id1535645906