DINOFLAGELLATES: TEENSY OCEAN STARS

This showy Christmas Cracker is a Dinoflagellate

The showy royal blue Christmas cracker looking fellow you see here is a dinoflagellate. 

Bioluminescent dinoflagellates are a type of plankton — teensy marine organisms that make the seaways shimmer as you swim through them or the tide crashes them against the shore. 

The first modern dinoflagellate was described by Baker in 1753, the first species was formally named by Muller in 1773. 

The first fossil forms were described by Ehrenberg in the 1830s from Cretaceous outcrops. More dinoflagellates have lived, died and gone extinct than there are living today. We know them mainly from fossil dinocysts dating back to the Triassic. They are one of the most primitive of the eukaryotic group with a fossil record that may extend into the Precambrian. They combine primitive characteristics of prokaryotes and advanced eukaryotic features.

The luciferase found in dinoflagellates is related to the green chemical chlorophyll found in plants. Their twinkling lights are brief, each containing about 100 million photons that shine for only a tenth of a second. While each individual flicker is here and gone in the wink of an eye, en masse they are breathtaking. I have spent several wondrous evenings scuba diving amongst these glittering denizens off our shores. What you know about light above the surface does not hold true for the light you see as bioluminescence. Its energy and luminosity come from a chemical reaction. 

In a luminescent reaction, two types of chemicals — luciferin and luciferase — combine together. Together, they produce cold light — light that generates less than 20% thermal radiation or heat. 

The light you see is produced by a compound called Luciferin. It is the shiny, showy bit in this chemical show. Luciferase acts as an enzyme, the substance that acts as a catalyst controlling the rate of chemical reactions, allowing the luciferin to release energy as it is oxidized. 

The colour of the light depends on the chemical structures of the chemicals. There are more than a dozen known chemical luminescent systems, indicating that bioluminescence evolved independently in different groups of organisms.

Coelenterazine is the type of luciferin we find in shrimp, fish and jellyfish. Dinoflagellates and krill share another class of unique luciferins, while ostracods or firefleas and some fish have a completely different luciferin — but all produce lights of various colours to great effect.  

MANATEE: PLEISTOCENE TEXANS

Manatees do not live year-round in Texas, but these gentle sea cows are known to occasionally visit, swimming in for a summer vacation and returning to warmer waters for the winter. 

Interestingly, we have recently found fossil evidence for manatees along the Texas coast dating back to the most recent ice age. 

The discovery raises questions about whether manatees have been visiting for thousands of years, or if an ancient population of ice age manatees once called Texas home.

The findings were published in Palaeontologia Electronica by lead author Christopher Bell, a professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences with co-authors Sam Houston State University Natural History Collections curator William Godwin and SHSU alumna Kelsey Jenkins — now a graduate student at Yale University — and SHSU Professor Patrick Lewis.

The eight fossils described in the paper include manatee jawbones and rib fragments from the Pleistocene, the geological epoch of the last ice age. Most of the bones were collected from McFaddin Beach near Port Arthur and Caplen Beach near Galveston during the past 50 years by amateur fossil collectors who donated their finds to the SHSU collections.

The Jackson Museum of Earth History at UT holds two of the specimens. A lower jawbone fossil, which was donated to the SHSU collections by amateur collector Joe Liggio, jumpstarted the research.

Manatee jawbones have a distinct S-shaped curve that immediately caught Godwin's eye. But Godwin said he was met with scepticism when he sought other manatee fossils for comparison. He recalls reaching out to a local fossil enthusiast who told him point-blank, "there are no Pleistocene manatees in Texas."

But an examination of the fossils by Bell and Lewis proved otherwise. The bones belonged to the same species of manatee that visits the Texas coast today, Trichechus manatus. An upper jawbone donated by U.S. Rep. Brian Babin was found to belong to an extinct form of the manatee, Trichechus manatus bakerorum.

The age of the manatee fossils is based on their association with better-known ice age fossils and paleo-Indian artefacts that have been found on the same beaches.

It is assumed that the cooler ice age climate would have made Texas waters even less hospitable to manatees than they are today. But the fact that manatees were in Texas — whether as visitors or residents — raises questions about the ancient environment and ancient manatees. The Texas coast stretched much farther into the Gulf of Mexico and hosted wider river outlets during the ice age than it does today. Either the coastal climate was warmer than is generally thought, or ice age manatees were more resilient to cooler temperatures than manatees of today.

Subsurface imaging of the now flooded modern continental shelf reveals both a greater number of coastal embayments and the presence of significantly wider channels during ice age times.

If there was a population of ice age manatees in Texas, it is entirely plausible that they would have ridden out winters in these warmer river outlets similar to how they do today in Florida and Mexico.

Reference: Christopher Bell, William Godwin, Kelsey Jenkins, Patrick Lewis. First fossil manatees in Texas: Trichechus manatus bakerorum in the Pleistocene fauna from beach deposits along the Texas Coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Palaeontologia Electronica, 2020; DOI: 10.26879/1006

BC'S FOSSIL BOUNTY ON TELUS OPTIK TV

We live in a diverse province edged by mountains, ocean, forests and streams. While our lens is often on the rugged beauty all around us, beneath our feet is yet another world.

Layers of rock hold fossils, each an interface to our deep past. 

Within each fragment, these ancient beings whisper their secrets, share their life experiences, tell us tales of community, how they made a living, who they rubbed shoulders with (or fins, or seedlings...) and convey the essence of a world long embedded in stone.

Join me as we explore the rich fossil bounty of fossil plants, dinosaurs to mighty marine reptiles and the people who unearth them. Discover British Columbia's violent past — how plate tectonics, volcanoes and glaciers shaped the land and why we find plant fossils along the Kitsilano foreshore and marine fossils beneath False Creek. Learn about the science of geochemistry from a palaeontologist who uses fossil teeth to reconstruct ancient environments.

Meet those who call Vancouver home and use this beautiful base for their mining explorations — opening up BC and communities through partnerships that honour First Nations wisdom, show a commitment to social responsibility & sound environmental practices.

​Hear from palaeontologists, geologists, geochemists, science organizations, dinosaur docents, palaeoartists and fossil preparators whose work brings our ancient world to life.

Funding is supported by TELUS STORYHIVE & DINO LAB INC. BC'S FOSSIL BOUNTY — SEASON ONE airs on TELUS Optik TV and the TELUS YouTube Channel to millions of viewers beginning Autumn 2022. Plans for SEASON TWO are in the works. 

Visit www.fossilhuntress.com to learn more and to hear updates on the project.

WOOLLY MAMMOTHS: MAMMUTHUS PRIMEGENIUS

Woolly Mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius,  have always held wonder for me. These massive, hairy — and likely very smelly beasts — lived alongside us for a time. 

If you stood beside him and reached way up, you might be able to touch his tusks but likely not reach up to his mouth or even his eyes. 

He had a shaggy coat of light or dark coloured hair with long outer hair strands covering a dense thick undercoat. His oil glands would have worked overtime to secrete oils, giving him natural waterproofing. Some of the hair strands we have recovered are more than a meter in length. These behemoth proboscideans boasted long, curved tusks, little ears, short tails and grazed on leaves, shrubs and grasses that would have been hard work to get at as much of his world was covered in ice and snow during his reign.

We first see Woolly Mammoths in northeastern Siberia dating back 700,000 years. We find them in East Asia as far back as 800,000 years ago. They arose from the massive steppe mammoths, Mammuthus trogontherii, slowly evolving traits we see in this older species to the mammoths we think of today. 

Over time, their body size shrank and their teeth and tusks evolved to take advantage of the tough vegetation available to those few animals who could chew their way through ice and snow and work these tundra grasses into a digestible form. 

The enamel plates of their cheek teeth multiplied while the enamel itself became thinner. Tusks slowly took on more of a curved to act as ploughs for the snow. 

Those smaller than their predecessors, they were still formidable. Their size offered protection against predators once full grown. Sadly for the juveniles, they offered tasty prey to big cats like Homotherium who roamed these ancient grasslands alongside them.

The Mammoths of the Steppe spread to the northern areas of Eurasia, down through Europe, into the British Isles to Spain and crossed over to populate North America via the Bering Isthmus. It was the lowered sea levels during the last Ice Age that exposed dry land between Asia and the Americas. Here in this flat, grassy treeless plain known as the Bering Land Bridge or Isthmus, animals, including humans, could migrate from Europe west into North America.

The woolly mammoth coexisted with our ancestors who made good use of their bones and tusks for tools, housing, art and food. The last of their lineage died out relatively recently on Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago — a time when we were making our first harps and flutes in Egypt, dams, canals and stone sculptures in Sumer, using numbers for the first time and using tin to make tools.

FISHING IN ANCIENT SEAS

If you could cast a fishing line into our ancient seas, it is likely that you would hook an ammonite, not a fish. When we find them, it is their hugely varied fossilized shells that we see. 

Rarely is the very soft, squid-like fellow inside preserved so we can easily forget what the entire animal looked like. 

These marine cephalopods were predatory, squid-like creatures that lived inside the coil-shaped shells we find. Like other cephalopods, ammonites had sharp, beak-like jaws inside a ring of squid-like tentacles that extended from their shells. They used these tentacles to snare prey, — plankton, vegetation, fish and crustaceans — similar to the way a squid or octopus hunt today.

Catching a fish with your hands is no easy feat, as I am sure you know. But the Ammonites were skilled and successful hunters. They caught their prey while swimming and floating in the water column. 

Within their shells, they had a number of chambers, called septa, filled with gas or fluid that were interconnected by a wee air tube called a siphuncle. By pushing air in or out, they were able to control their buoyancy in the water column.

They lived in the last chamber of their shells, continuously building new shell material as they grew. As each new chamber was added, the squid-like body of the ammonite would move down to occupy the final outside chamber.

We find ammonite fossils, and plenty of them, in sedimentary rock from all over the world. They were prolific breeders that evolved rapidly. 

In some cases, we find rock beds where we can see evidence of a new species that evolved, lived and died out in such a short time span that we can walk through time, following the course of evolution using ammonites as a window into the past. 

For this reason, they make excellent index fossils. An index fossil is a species that allows us to link a particular rock formation, layered in time with a particular species or genus found there. Generally, deeper is older, so we use the sedimentary layers of rock to match up to specific geologic time periods, rather like the way we use tree rings to date trees.

ANCIENT MARINE PREDATORS: PLESIOSAURS

Plesiosaurus were a large, carnivorous air-breathing marine reptile with strong jaws and sharp teeth that moved through the water with four flippers. 

We see them arise in the fossil record some 203 million years ago and then go extinct 66 million years ago.

We had originally thought that this might not be the most aerodynamic design but it was clearly effective as they used the extra set to create a wee vortex that aided in their propulsion. 

In terms of mechanical design, they have a little something in common with an unlikely favourite of mine — dragonflies.

We have recreated plesiosaur movements and discovered that they were able to optimize propulsion to make use of their own wake. As their front flippers paddled in big circular movements, the propelled water created little whirlpools under their bellies. The back flippers would then paddle between these whirlpools pushing the plesiosaur forward to maximal effect. This use of air currents is similar to how dragonflies move through the air. 

They were very successful hunters, outcompeting ichthyosaurs who thrived in the Triassic but were replaced in the Jurassic and Cretaceous by these new aquatic beasties. 

Our ancient seas teemed with these predatory marine reptiles with their long necks and barrel-shaped bodies. Plesiosaurs were smaller than their pliosaur cousins, weighing in at about 450 kg or 1,000 lbs and reaching about 4.5 metres or 15 feet in length. For a modern comparison, they were roughly twice as long as a standard horse or about as long as a good size hippo.

PHRAGMOTEUTHIS CONOCAUDA

Phragmoteuthis conocauda

A superb specimen of Phragmoteuthis conocauda, (Quenstedt, 1846-49). These ancient marine lovelies had an internal phragmocone and ten arms.

Phragmoteuthis is a genus of extinct coleoid cephalopod known from the late Triassic to the Lower Jurassic. Its soft tissue has been preserved wonderfully. Some rare specimens contain intact ink sacs, arm hooks, and others, gills.

There are some wonderful specimens from the Carnian, Late Triassic outcrops near Lunz, in Lower Austria with wee arm hooks and ink sacs, though the ink now looks like an agglomerate of grains. 

In Toarcian deposits in Southwestern Germany, we find fragments of Phracmoteuthis concocauda with bits of gill preserved. They look remarkably like the gills of octopod and vampyromorph colcoids.

Palaeontologist Jurji (Jura) Jeletzky characterized phragmoteuthids as having a large tripartite, fanlike pro-ostracum forming the longest portion of the shell, attached to about three-quarters of the circumference of a comparatively small breviconic phragmocone with short camerae and superficially belemnitid-like siphuncle.

Add that to an absent or much-reduced rostrum at the apical part of the phragmocone, belemnite-like arm hooks, an ink sack, beaks resembling those of recent teuthids, and a muscular mantle.

Think early squid. These are their great great grandparents. 

This specimen is in the collections of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, Norway's oldest and largest museum of natural history in the lovely neighbourhood of Tøyen near Grünerløkka in Oslo. If you visit, check out the nearby Munch Museum to see some of Edvard Munch's work.

TRACKING WHALES WITH BARNACLES

We can trace the lineage of barnacles back to the Middle Cambrian. That is half a billion years of data to sift through. 

If you divide that timeline in half yet again, we begin to understand barnacles and their relationship to other sea-dwelling creatures — with a lens that reveals ancient migration patterns.

Barnacles are in the infraclass Cirripedia in the class Maxillopoda. They are marine arthropods related to crabs and lobsters. 

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, barnacles are known as k̕wit̕a̱'a and broken barnacle shells are known as t̕sut̕su'ma. Unless scraped off, barnacles live on one single sturdy object for their entire lives — 8 to 20 years — while chowing down on tasty snacks like plankton and algae they absorb from the surrounding water.

One of the most interesting aha moments in palaeontology came from the study of 270,000 million-year-old k̕wit̕a̱'as. These sticky wee crustaceans have enabled us to trace the course of ancient whale migration. 

University of California Berkeley doctoral student Larry Taylor published some clever findings on how fossil barnacles hitched a ride on the backs of humpback and grey whales millions of years ago and used this data to reconstruct the migrations of ancient whale populations.

The barnacles record details about the whales’ yearly travels in the fossil record. By following this barnacle trail, Taylor et al. were able to reconstruct migration routes of whales from millions of years in the past.

Today, Humpback whales come from both the Southern Hemisphere (July to October with over 2,000 whales) and the Northern Hemisphere (December to March about 450 whales along with Central America) to Panama (and Costa Rica). They undertake annual migrations from polar summer feeding grounds to winter calving and nursery grounds in subtropical and tropical coastal waters.

One surprise find is that the coast of Panama has been a meeting ground for humpback whales going back at least 270,000 years. To see how the barnacles have travelled through the migration routes of ancient whales, the team used oxygen isotope ratios in barnacle shells and measured how they changed over time with ocean conditions. 

Did the whale migrate to warmer breeding grounds or colder feeding grounds? Barnacles retain this information even after they fall off the whale, sink to the ocean bottom, and become fossils. As a result, the travels of fossilized barnacles can serve as a proxy for the journeys of whales in the distant past.

Barnacles can play an important role in estimating paleo-water depths. The degree of disarticulation of fossils suggests the distance they have been transported, and since many species have narrow ranges of water depths, it can be assumed that the animals lived in shallow water and broke up as they were washed down-slope. 

Barnacles have few predators. Their one nemesis is the whelk. It seems that catching a lifetime's ride on a passing whale would have extended their ability to feed on plankton in a variety of settings whelk-free and likely live longer than they might have cemented to something closer to the seafloor.