An animal dies. Lying where it falls, it's washed over with sediment, mineralized, converted to rock and pushed down into the earth. Eons later, when the graveyard of streambed, or lakeshore or sea floor is exposed through mountain building and erosion, these remnants of ancient life reappear on the surface. A human - the only creature for which the past appears to have meaning - encounters this fractured forma, recognizing in it not only the long-vanished template of subsequent change, but also certain connection. This is the dialectic of a fossil: we don't go back in time, but time comes back to us.
The human relationship with fossils, in fact, is far more complex, going beyond simple biology and geology to something that sees both scientific information and objets d'art bought, sold, stolen and fought over. This commodification of preserved imagination not only drives people into the countryside with picks and hammers and delusions of grandeur, but also leads tourists to plunder declared World Heritage sites simply for their cachet, as notably made the news this past summer when some thieves ran off with specimens from the bizarre, one-of-a-kind Cambrian era fauna of Canada's famed Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park. But there's yet another parallel arc - that of the professional.
As children, dinosaurs impress us simply for being super-sized and cool looking (Barney notwithstanding). At some point, however, these creatures morph from distorted caricatures of the nature we know to vanguards of the nature we will never know, touchstones to an unfathomable dimension of history. Lost in the sleepy folds of deep time, dinosaurs become the monsters under evolution's bed, forever lovable in the mind's eye - albeit due mostly to the immunity 65 million post-extinction years brings. For some folks, fascination with this organic machinery turns to consideration of what it took to run it, the ecology that supported it, and its legacy of design. Which brings us to paleontologists like Richard McCrea.
In September, 2010, a team led by McCrea discovered a massive deposit of untouched dinosaur remains deep in the Northern Rockies near Tumbler Ridge, adding to a growing body of data showing that these animals were abundant in the area during the middle part of the Cretaceous (a lengthy span covering 144 - 65 mybp). But elation was dampened by the B.C. government's attitude toward protecting heritage lands and artifacts. And here the two arcs meet: McCrea - who runs a locally supported museum in Tumbler Ridge dedicated to the area's fossil riches-won't reveal details of his finds because there are no solid laws in the province to protect them from commercial fossil-hunters.
Tumbler Ridge first became of interest when the footprint trackway of an Ankylosaur (a tank-like armoured beast) was discovered on the bank of Flatbed Creek in 2002. The discovery sparked much local interest as residents of this then-depressed coal-mining town systematically explored the surrounding area for the new resource. New and significant finds were made, primarily of trackways - McCrea's specialty. Surveying one stream for more tracks, McCrea actually discovered a first actual skeleton - a Lambeosaur (that would be a particularly ornate duck-billed dino) that he has now spent some four years excavating. A skeleton not only interesting in its own right, but one which also tells an ancient ecological tale: close to 50 Tyrannosaur teeth are preserved with the skeleton, most shed by juveniles, indicating that the dead Lambeosaur was scavenged, hyena-style, by a pack of ravenous young Tyrannosaurs. McCrea's finds are significant: the first dinosaurs in B.C. and western Canada's oldest, from a period (approx. 93 mybp) when land animals were not well preserved on a global scale.
These are all newsworthy angles - as is the grassroots element, burgeoning economic promise, and the lingering politic of protection - and stories are being written about the Tumbler-area finds. I'm one of those writing, but I'm not at all happy about what I'm finding out about our government's lack of foresight when it comes to the scientific worth of major fossil deposits. I began researching these notions during a year-long investigation of the black-market trade in fossils in the late nineties, and have continued through many other feature assignments and book projects. A decade later, the saddest thing is that so much has been lost because so little has changed regarding the protection of fossils as a heritage element; and because of cavalier attitudes that value mining and power and lumber interests over information that should intrinsically be part of the public trust. A fault of thinking so egregious that a book appeared just last week on the subject : Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC's Fossils , by Prince George journalist and author, Vivien Lougheed.
Personally, I'm more interested in our peculiar "biophilia" (an instinctive bond between humanity and other living systems in the argot of the evolutionary ecologist E.O. Wilson) with fossils, in paleontologists, and in our relationship with the wilderness of deep time - the subduction of past life into the guts of the Earth and its reappearance via the geologic cycle. But with a restless Earth continually serving up the trope of extinction on a platter, while we ignore its message about our own vulnerability in a short-sighted rush of consumption and false immortality, I'm all about making this lack of protection political.
