Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
riverbank. It turned out to be the vertebra of a large marine reptile. Trask
soon spotted other vertebras, and various other bones as well. Large exca-
vating equipment was brought in, and over several months the remains of
this creature—intact and complete—were removed from its lithic tomb.
Specialists from the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta were brought in to help
with skull preparation, but it was largely a local production. The best part of
this story is that the skeleton stayed home. It was not sold for big bucks; it
was not exiled to some far off museum. It stayed in Courtney, and a museum
grew up around it.
This particular find galvanized the paleontological community in
British Columbia and elsewhere. Simply knowing that such fossils were pres-
* ent in the Vancouver Island region sharpened eyes grown complacent and
brought new collectors to the region to search for this type of fossil treasure.
Before long several more finds were made. Perhaps the most exciting came
from Hornby Island, at the same site where we had drilled for paleomagnet-
ics. On Fossil Beach, one of the best of northwest collectors, a man named
Graham Beard, found the region's first mosasaur fossil.
The presence of a mosasaur, a large marine lizard, sent anyone who had
discovered ammonites in this region scurrying back to look at their fossils,
for mosasaurs are thought to have been the most important of all ammonite
predators. This conclusion had come from supposedly telltale bite marks
found on many ammonite shells.
The past
is
time and place. But it is life, the inhabitants, as well. The
fossil themselves that we find are time machines, for they as much as any
other information can transport us back into deep time. But as we shall see
in this chapter, the study of fossils is fraught with uncertainty and with mul-
tiple paths of interpretation. The fossils are the data: They are the real ob-
jects coming to us from deep time, and as is written on many a laboratory
door, "Good data are immortal." But data are as naked as the skeletons we
find; they need to be prepared and interpreted. Though the data are immor-
tal, the interpretations are not. To put interpretations to the test, scientists
all over the world invoke another time machine.
