Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
specimens are housed. Natural history museums are one of the most impor-
tant time machines of all. It is no coincidence that they grew into stately
mansions during the periods of most active geological exploration of Europe
and North America.
Deciphering the age of rocks hy using fossils necessitates a clear under-
standing of just what constitutes a fossil "species." This can be achieved only
if large numbers of fossils have been collected, organized, and committed to
a museum for later study. Eventually, any geologist who wants to understand
ancient time using fossils ends up in a museum. In 1975 I found myself in
such a place, a giant basement museum, a dark and dusty warehouse filled
with metal cabinets holding corpses of ancient North America, the enor-
mous fossil collection of the Geological Survey of Canada. Outside, the cold
wintet of Ottawa held Ontario in its frozen grip. Being from a warmer corner
of North America, I had had no previous experience with such unremitting
winter. I had traveled here to see collections assembled by all my scientific
predecessors, the long string of geologists who had traveled to the Vancou-
ver Island region to collect fossils. The dates of these entries, ranging from a
century ago to only a few years before, bore witness to long-standing curios-
ity. Atrayed in the boxes were specimens 1 had seen only in monographs, fos-
sils pristine and fragmentary, eloquent testimony to a proud geological sur-
vey's long work in deciphering the age of its northwest corner.
I had come to see more than fossils, though. Five stories above me an
old Russian worked away: George Jeletzky, one of the giants of geology and a
world authority on Cretaceous ammonites. Jeletzky was a legend for many
reasons. He was prolific, he was a pioneer in Cretaceous geology, he was a
refugee: He had fled the Soviet Union during World War II, his fossils his
only possessions, and made his way to Canada. He still had a price on his
head and faced execution if he ever returned to his native Russia. Warm, hu-
morous, and earthy, he was thus exiled forever for crimes imagined or politi-
cal (if there is any difference). Thete may be no greater punishment than
separating a Russian from his country.
Jeletzky had spent years in the wilderness of western Canada, deci-
phering the rock record of the Cretaceous there and splicing together the
