SUPERNATURAL BRITISH COLUMBIA

Our province is known as Supernatural BC — and for good reason. British Columbia on Canada's far western shores boasts a rich and diverse geography. We are home to some of the most impressive fauna and flora on the planet — both living and fossilized. 

The province is home to more than a hundred native species including a few only known from British Columbia. Birds, bees, bats and insects soar, buzz & flutter on our coastal winds. Our nutrient rich coastal waters are home to diverse marine life from jellyfish, salmon to our coastal whales.

From great bears to wee mice, the Pacific Northwest is a paradise with abundant food resources. Here's a partial list for you to look for as you explore the province: Moose, Black and Brown Bear, Boreal Woodland Caribou, Black-tailed & Mule Deer, British Columbia Wolf, Roosevelt Elk, Eagles, Owls, Hawks, Steller's Jay, American Bison, Humpback, Orca and Blue whales, California Sea Lions, Canada Lynx, Collared Pika, Cougar, Dall sheep, Northern Elephant Seal, Northern Right-whale Dolphin, Wolverine, Yellow-Bellied & Vancouver Island Marmots, Vancouver Island water shrew, Queen Charlotte Hairy Woodpecker, Pine Grosbeak and Townsend Voles.   

The land they inhabit and you and I stroll upon was built by great tectonic forces that pushed and pulled large sections of the Earth's crust to the shape of the landmasses we see today. 

Our province is a crazy quilt of bits and pieces made up from the accretion of exotic terranes that have been added bit by bit lengthening our province from where it meets Alberta then west to were it meets the Pacific — the ocean we can thank for our mild climate.  

For those who live in Vancouver, we live upon the North American Plate which sits near the boundary of a major fault. The Juan de Fuca plate is slowly pushing against the edge of our province and slowly sliding underneath. 

That process of relentless pushing against the outer edge of British Columbia is what helped to form our mountains. Picture slowly pressing and sliding a table cloth along a table. As you press, the material bunches up, folds and builds small ridges. 

That faulting and folding mimics what we see across our world as the tectonic plates play the same role as your hand, pressing and pushing large sections of land. The movement and pressure is released as earthquakes and the eruption of volcanoes which have also shaped our province. 

Our climate has also changed over time. We can see this in the smooth mountains and deep valleys that were gouged or polished by massive glaciers. There was a time when the city I live in and much of our coast was covered in 2 kilometres of ice. It began to melt and recede from our Interior about 18,000 years ago and our coast around 13,000 years ago

Along that journey of province-building forces, the rocks we find here today record the life history of our province — and indeed that of the Earth — for over 600 million years of Earth's 4.543 billion year history. British Columbia's fossil bounty includes dinosaurs, marine reptiles, plants, insects, fish, sharks, bison, musk ox, mammoth, birds, pterosaurs, ammonites and trilobites!

British Columbia's Provincial Symbols:

Every province has their official list of provincial birds, gemstones and fossils. Here's the hit list for British Columbia:

• Provincial Fossil: Elasmosaur
• Provincial Gemstone: Jade
• Provincial Fish: Pacific Salmon, Oncorhynchus (all seven species)
• Provincial Flower: Pacific Dogwood, Cornus nuttallii
• Provincial Bird: Steller's Jay, Cyanacitta stelleri
• Provincial Tree: Western Red Cedar (and we boast some more than 2,000 years old!)
• Provincial Mammal: Spirit Bear, Ursus americanus kermodei

British Columbia's Fossils — Honorable Mentions:

• Lace Crab, Marrella splendens, Burgess Shale, Stephen Formation, Cambrian, 508 mya 
• Ammonite, Canadoceras yokoyamai, Haslam Formation, Cretaceous, 80-84 mya
• Fusulinid Foraminifera (one-celled animal), Yabeina columbiana, Marble Canyon, 260-268 mya
• Ichthyosaur, Shonisaurus sikanniensis, Pardonet Formation, 210-220 mya
• Salmon, Eosalmo driftwoodensis, Tranquille Formation, 52-53 mya
• Trilobite, Olenoides serratus, Burgess Shale, Cambrian, 508 mya

Additional Reading:

If you are interested in reading more on the forming of British Columbia, I highly recommend Dr. John Clague's book: Vancouver — City on the Edge. It is very approachable and beautifully done. Dr. Clague is also Episode One of Season One on BC's Fossil Bounty coming to TELUS Optik TV Autumn 2022. I'll also put a copy of his audio on the Fossil Huntress Podcast once the episode airs in a few months.

To get to know your neighbours in British Columbia, you are welcome to visit www.speciesofthepacificnorthwest.com which shares many of our furry, feathery and fishy friends along with their names in Kwak'wala spoken by the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations along British Columbia's coast.

UPPER CRETACEOUS TOOTHED BIRDS IN SOUTH AMERICA

70-Million-Year-Old Toothed Enantiornithes Bird Beak

Teeth and jaws, beaks and claws — all species adapt and change over time based on survival. One of the key features of being alive is needing to eat. Depending on what is on the menu, we adapt accordingly. 

I had been thinking about this from a very mammal-centric perspective, but it is true for all animals — birds included.

When we think of our feathered friends, we think of beaks and feathers. True, birds descend from the mighty lineage of dinosaurs, but our experience of them is of their modern forms. 

This modern viewpoint of their characteristics makes beaks with teeth seemingly more fantasy than reality — except this has not always been the case. 70 million years ago, birds flying our Cretaceous skies in what would become South America, Europe and Asia had teeth embedded in their beaks.

The discovery of polyphyodonty and dental replacement in toothed stem birds dates back to the nineteenth century. Marsh reported replacement teeth inside resorption pits in the Late Cretaceous Hesperornis and Ichthyornis.

Enantiornithine Birds & Cladogram

The birds that inhabit the current biomes do not have teeth, but the primitive birds found as fossils in the Upper Cretaceous of Brazil certainly did. 

These ancient relatives to our modern fauna had teeth embedded in their jaw-beaks, clawed fingers and a long tail. 

Both these ancient birds and their modern cousins are descended from the dinosaurs, more specifically the Maniraptora, that clade of coelurosaurian dinosaurs characterized by long arms and three-fingered hands — reduced or fused in some lineages — and semi-lunate or half-moon shaped bone in their wrists you will know as the carpus. 

As with all the dinosaurs in this clad, they had teeth and lots of them.

William Nava, head of the Marília Museum of Paleontology, São Paulo, Brazil, uncovered an outcrop in the city of Presidente Prudente with abundant fossilized bird bones. 

Bird bones are a rare thing as they are delicate, often scavenged before burial and hollow, making them poor candidates for preservation. While bird bones preserved as fossils are generally rare, this was not the case at William's Quarry. The site was a smorgasbord of bones from a number of primitive bird species that lived at the end of the Cretaceous. 

The birds belong to the group of Enantiornithes who looked very much like our modern birds on the outside, but internally they had clawed fingers on each wing and teeth which they replaced in a similar fashion to most reptiles. 

Two other sites have exceptionally preserved Enantiornithes bones. Since most Enantiornithes bones are fragmentary, some species are only known from a piece of a single bone. We are luckier at some sites than others. Almost all complete, fully articulated fossil specimens with soft tissue preserved were known from Las Hoyas in Cuenca, Spain and the Jehol group in Liaoning, China. But the fossil outcrops in the Adamantina Formation, Bauru Group of Brazil can now be added to that very short list.  

If you fancy a read, check out their publication, Dental replacement in Mesozoic birds: evidence from newly discovered Brazilian enantiornithines.” The team included Yun-Hsin Wu and Luis M. Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, David J. Bottjer of the University of Southern California, William Nava from the Marília Museum of Paleontology, and Agustín G. Martinelli from the Vertebrate Paleontology Section of the Bernardino Rivadavia Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences.

Publication link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98335-8

Images: Photographs of the enantiornithine specimens MPM-90, MPM-373, and MPM-351, and a simplified cladogram highlighting the stem avian taxa discussed in this study. MPM-373: (a) dorsal view; (b) right lateral view; (c) left lateral view. MPM-90: (d) dorsal view; (e) right lateral view. MPM-351: (f) left lateral view. En external nares, Fp frontal process. With an embedded illustration of a reconstruction of Sinornis santensis by McBlackneck. There is some mice type used so feel free to click the image to see if full size.

The studied specimens consist of two sets of premaxillae (MPM-90 and MPM-373) and an incomplete left dentary (MPM-351) exquisitely preserved in three dimensions. These specimens are housed at the Museu de Paleontologia de Marília (MPM), São Paulo State, Brazil.