Nov 17, 2000
|
THE UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA Nov 17, 2000 |
 Venture high enough into the Rocky Mountains of northern B.C. and you’ll find a geological gold mine of fossils 500 million years old.These mountain regions, northwest of Fort St. John, have rarely been touched by human hands, but paleontologist Leanne Pyle has come to know them well. During the course of her PhD work with Dr. Chris Barnes (earth and ocean sciences), Pyle joined him on five consecutive summer field trips, camping out for three weeks at a time in regions of the Rockies accessible only by helicopter. “I hadn’t done any camping before and the work was really physically demanding, but the isolation was so peaceful,” she says. From various sites they recovered about six tonnes of rock, in 700 separate samples, containing micro-fossils of conodonts — one of the earliest known groups of fish. The relics help pinpoint Western Canada’s geological origins. Through a microscope, the conodont teeth (only about a millimetre long) look like tiny, multi-barbed hooks. Teeth are all that remain of the conodonts since their body structure was mostly soft tissue. “My dad calls them ‘extinct dinosaur-worm teeth’ but really the animals are more eel-like,” says Pyle, who grew up in Rockglen, Saskatchewan (population 500). Until recently, her parents ran the town’s only movie house — the 300-seat Dreamland Theatre, built in the 1940s by her grandfather. A field trip to dinosaur-rich Drumheller, Alberta, during first-year university got her hooked on geology. “It just sort of happened” after she found her first dinosaur bone. Separating fossils from the rocks is a slow, painstaking process. Patience is a virtue in the lab, but sheer physical endurance is demanded in the field. Lugging rock samples from elevations of 2,000 metres, not to mention the presence of grizzly bears, puts a different light on the science of studying fossils. “We always had an undergraduate assistant along with us who learned that paleontology is not only about dusting off dinosaur bones. We gave quite a few students a great experience — they just loved it.” Pyle will remain at UVic after convocation as a post-doctoral fellow in the Barnes lab and she’s teaching earth and ocean sciences undergraduate courses in paleobiology and evolution. |