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Tammy and I had to stop in Winnipeg on our way up to Churchill further north in the province (with hopes of seeing Polar Bears and the Aurora Borealis for our anniversary). While doing a little research on Churchill I discovered it is the type locality for the world's largest trilobite. Now I'm not talking something that is a little bit bigger than some of the really large Paradoxides or Cambropallas trilobites you see from Morocco (fake or otherwise). I'm talking taking trilobites to a whole new extreme (but more on that later). We flew from Miami to Winnipeg on a flight that connected through Toronto. I really don't know why the computerized reservation systems conjured up by these airlines let you make routes with tight connections--but they DO! We planned on spending an extra day in Winnipeg as the tight connection in Toronto seemed highly optimistic at best. We were late out of Miami when the first officer didn't show up and they had to call in a substitute. The pilots didn't even try to make up the delay in the air and we arrived well behind schedule. I doubt that we could have made the connection anyway (> 1 hour) having to go through customs/immigration and travel to the far reaches of the airport to catch the connecting flight. Our flight had left before we even cleared processing in Canada but we were able to book a follow-up flight a few hours later. It still took us over 2.5 hours to reach our gate for the connecting flight and so (without the aid of teleportation--or maybe a large canon) we were doomed from the start. We got in later but well in time to make our exceedingly expensive flight to Churchill. The rail line is down (washed out this spring) and there are no roads up to this isolated corner of Manitoba. I had heard that a truly enormous trilobite had been discovered in Churchill and that it currently resides in the Manitoba Museum so promptly after breakfast we grabbed a cab to the city center and arrived at the unassuming (from the outside) museum. We didn't even make it inside before my gaze was captured by the beautiful stone slabs that clad this building's exterior. Soon I was to learn that this was the locally famous Late Ordovician (~450 myo) Tyndall Stone. The interesting two-toned appearance of this dolomitic limestone is said to be ichnofossils from some sort of burrowing animal. It really makes the stone quite striking from far away with this unusual patterning. I can see why they have used this stone to face the surfaces of many prominent buildings in Canada (and abroad). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndall_stone
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