‘A big piece of the puzzle of life’
NEW GALLERY WILL TELL EVOLUTIONARY STORY THROUGH THE GEOGRAPHY OF CANADA
Jean-Bernard Caron, senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, is awaiting a shipment of fossils from Quebec.
They won’t be much to look at, he says, just microscopic flecks in stone, invisible to the naked eye. But they will be different from the collection of 500-million-year-old fossils in black shale laid out on his desk in a corner office overlooking the provincial legislature.
The recently discovered Quebec fossils are something like 4.2 billion years old. That is almost as old as the planet Earth itself, which is about 4.6 billion years old.
He is understandably excited. The dawn of life is being pushed ever further back in time, and the vastness of Canada’s geography — which overlays ancient tropical seas and prehistoric forests of ferns — has been the key to many of the discoveries that prove this.
Canada, as Caron puts it, tells the whole story of life on Earth, from the mostly bacterial life forms that arose in the earliest eras, through the first complex organisms that became plants and animals, into the time of dinosaurs, and eventually the more familiar creatures we know today. From the oldest bacterial fossils in Quebec, through the “proto-animals” of Mistaken Point, Nfld., the diverse creatures in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, the fish transitioning to land life at Miguasha, Que., the giant plants and first evidence of eggs at Joggins, N.S., to the dinosaurs of Alberta’s Badlands, Canada has it all.
But this museum, Canada’s largest, has not told this evolutionary story in all its glory. It’s got mammals down, with their own gallery. The dinosaur gallery is famous. But that only takes you back a quarter billion years. The life forms that predate the dinosaurs, most long since extinct, could fill a museum many times over. Nearly four billion years of life’s history have got short shrift.
“It’s a big piece of the puzzle of life we haven’t told yet,” Caron said.
There was, for example, one particular Acutiramus, a giant monster lobsterish creature as long as a man and wide as a pig, with claws like lacrosse sticks, that hunted the warm waters over Ontario 420 million years ago, only to be buried in some catastrophic mudslide, and unearthed in the last century. That terrifying slab of stone is now safely stored in the ROM’s backrooms. The museum also has a smaller specimen, from the Fort Erie, Ont., area, that is preserved so well you cannot only see its eyes, but the cells that compose them.
“It’s a giant shrimp. You don’t want to meet him in the sea when you scuba dive,” Caron said. “I’m glad he’s extinct.”
So work has begun in earnest on a new gallery dedicated to the Dawn of Life, set to open in 2021, financed largely by philanthropists Jeff Willner and Stacey Madge. Nearly all of the artifacts on display will have come from Canada.
“We want people to be fascinated by their own history,” Caron said. So the gallery will be designed not only as a journey back in time into the ancient Cambrian Sea, but a journey across Canada, from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia westwards through Ontario toward the Rocky Mountains. Each will represent a new step in evolution: the origins of multicellularity, complex organs, sex, eggs, and the various modifications that let animals escape the water for the land and sky.
There is an old joke that evolution is a tale of teeth mating to produce slightly different teeth. After all, teeth are what gets left behind. Most else rots away. But most animals that existed on Earth had no hard parts, let alone teeth. Finding the soft parts of extinct animals has long been a tricky part of paleontology.
The Burgess Shale cut through this conundrum.
This is Caron’s specialty, an area in the Rocky Mountains in Yoho National Park where a collapse of a huge amount of sediment half a billion years ago exquisitely preserved the earliest creatures of the Cambrian explosion, one of the most productive periods of evolutionary history. It is “a window into a world that normally would have disappeared,” Caron said. Sometimes you can even make out the creatures’ intestines and their final meals. One of the ROM’s fossils from the Burgess Shale is a 500-million-year-old fish that is the ancestor of all modern vertebrates.
Mistaken Point, on the southern tip of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, is the oldest of the four fossil sites, at 565 million years old. One fossil the ROM has from there, for example, is of Bradgatia linfordensis, a strange organism that shows a kind of fractal symmetry. Caron says scientists used to think it was a plant or fungus or algae, but now it is regarded as an early and extinct branch of animals. “They are still very mysterious,” he said.
Miguasha, Que., on the south shore of the Gaspé Peninsula, is 375 million years old, and has given up evidence of the evolutionary changes that later enabled fish to transition from sea to land. Joggins, N.S., on the Bay of Fundy, is a bit more recent, and shows evidence of animals on land in the Carboniferous period, when there was an explosion of plant life and a rise in atmospheric oxygen levels. Caron called it the dawn of the age of giants, such as dragonflies the size of dogs and ferns that grew as high as a 10 storey building.
Josh Basseches, the ROM’s director and CEO was to formally announce the gallery at an event Wednesday morning. Jeff Willner, one of the namesake donors, said the gallery will be “a story for all people, told from a uniquely Canadian perspective, which will help us understand not only our past, but also the world we’ll live in tomorrow.”
IT’S A GIANT SHRIMP. YOU DON’T WANT TO MEET HIM IN THE SEA WHEN YOU SCUBA DIVE... I’M GLAD HE’S EXTINCT.
— JEAN-BERNARD CARON