Search the Community

Tammy and I spent our anniversary in Churchill, Manitoba (Canada) this year in an effort to see both Polar Bears by day and the Aurora Borealis by night. We succeeded in the first half of this mission but cloudy skies that had Churchill socked-in for the duration of our stay occluded any views we had of the nighttime sky (actually, the daytime sky as well--we never saw the sun while we were there). We had learned about Isotelus rex (the world's current record holder for most enormous species of trilobite) and were able to visit the specimen collected in Churchill when we visited the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/78783-manitoba-museum-winnipeg/ We knew that the beaches would have some nice outcrops of Late Ordovician fossils where the giant trilobite was discovered and we looked for an opportunity to pay homage to I. rex with a pilgrimage to the type locality on our trip. Walking the beaches during Polar Bear season requires some caution and some extra preparation--like some sled dogs to help alert us to the presence of bears and a guide (Gerald, the owner of our B&B in Churchill--Blue Sky Bed & Sled). There are large boulders of Precambrian metagreywacke (aka "Churchill Quartzite") that are big enough for Polar Bears to hide among and pop-out with little notice and these limited sight lines make it necessary to take extra precautions when fossil hunting (bear dogs and shotguns are not normally required fossil hunting gear). It didn't take us too long poking around the lighter colored Ordovician limestone cobbles to start spotting fossils. Surfaces with dense deposits of bivalves were pretty easy to spot. There are apparently both similar looking bivalves and brachiopods occurring in this outcrop and we didn't inspect the fossils closely enough (it was quite chilly out with the stiff breeze) to decide which we were seeing. I'm not familiar enough with these types of fossils to be able to quickly distinguish. We also saw some evidence of gastropod steinkerns but they were not nearly as common as the bivalve/brachipod type of fossils. We also saw an interesting patterned rock that may be a fossil, ichnofossil, or maybe simply something geological and abiotic. It was pretty wild looking whatever it was. We didn't spot any rugose (horn) corals but did see what appeared to be some tabulate corals and one colonial coral that forms a tessellated pattern of what look like chain links--quite distinctive. We saw many occurrences of this finely patterned honeycomb-like fossil which I assume is a colonial (tabulate) coral and not something like a bryozoan or a Receptactulites. I need to do a bit more research online to see if I can't narrow down what types of fossils we were seeing. A little searching netted some of the sightings of the chambered linear fossils of some orthoconic cephalopods. These seem to catch the interest of most of the locals and several of them have nice specimens of these fossils (though few have any idea what they actually are/were). I tried to look around for some of the in situ slabs of limestone where trilobite fossils or the ichnofossil trails of the same might be found. I did spot some nice flat pavements after a bit of searching but could not locate any of the (very rare) giant trilobites for a photo. Pictured above are our Polar Bear alert dogs Sony and Gracie enjoying a visit to the beach to run around and splash in the frigid waters. Cheers. -Ken