Pembina Paleontology

11/19/2025

This article was very interesting, and as it somewhat relates to our recent mammoth abstract, couldn't help but share it here.

Evidence from key archaeological sites suggests a major cosmic explosion may have reshaped the climate and ecosystems of the late Pleistocene. Scientists are expanding the evidence supporting the idea that a fragmented comet exploded over Earth nearly 13,000 years ago. This cosmic event may have

11/08/2025

"Proboscidae in the Pembina Valley," is the title of our new abstract, presented today at The Manitoba Archaeological Society Conference in Brandon.

This exciting research is the first official documentation of a fossil woolly mammoth tooth from the Pembina Valley!

Specimen NH94-129-752 at the Pilot Mound & District Museum is identified as a lower left M3 molar of 'Mammuthus primigenius,' or woolly mammoth, from a gravel pit south of La Riviere, Manitoba. The measurements are consistent with a mature adult in the later stages of life.

It was a pleasure to present on this keystone fossil of Manitoba's terminal ice age megafauna to a whole different venue today! We made some really great networking connections in the archaeological community, and on a more personal note, we brought our son on board for this research project, and this was his first abstract publication and conference experience! 🦣

02/07/2025

A really cool current events article on plesiosaur skin, publish this week in the journal 'Current Biology:'

Hint: Think ‘turtle.’

02/02/2025

Happy Groundhog Day!

Manitoba hasn't rendered any fossilized groundhogs yet, but beavers are their close rodent relatives, each with continously growing front teeth. Did you know that in 2017, a giant beaver jaw was discovered in a southern Manitoba gravel pit? Size estimates put this Ice Age beaver at the size of a modern bear... move over, Manitoba Merv... this year, we're celebrating your prehistoric cousin! 🦫

This fossil is housed in the collection of the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg.

Curators at the Manitoba Museum often get calls from excited members of the public who think they've come across a fossil, but the bones usually turn out to be from farm animals. Not this time.

01/29/2025

With the arrival of the Lunar New Year, we turn our fossil finding eyes from the ground to the sky to ponder the moon during the Cretaceous Period. Moving away from the Earth at 3.78 cm a year, the moon would have looked significantly larger in the Cretaceous night sky. But perhaps more interestingly, a recent study (see link below) from last fall indicates that the moon was experiencing active volcanism during the Cretaceous... kinda makes you wonder if it was close enough for dinosaurs to see craters or eruptions with the naked eye... 🤔

Happy Lunar New Year! 🪵 🐍

New results from China’s Chang’e 5 lunar samples returned to Earth provide evidence for active volcanoes on the Moon as recently as 120 million years ago. Previously, scientists had thought that any activity with magma (molten rock) rising to the Moon’s...READ MORE

01/26/2025

Our apologies for not keeping up with this page lately. We haven't had a whole lot that we can formally announce just yet, but that doesn't mean we aren't hard at work!

Right now, it's writing season. That means we're just in the office a lot. I'm involved in an exciting new research paper that uses non-glacial vertical faulting of bentonite, as in the attached picture, to predict the location of large vertebrate fossils. It's rather detailed in the geophysics, but it's an exciting model which correlates with old stories I've been told from the equipment operators from Pembina Mountain Clays. And it's exactly how we found the paleoctopus in 2021. It's a concept that has been casually observed from different perspectives, but never coalesced or geologically studied. But the hard data sure seem to support the observations. Stay tuned for that paper.

This is also the year that I begin authoring the chapter on Cretaceous Manitoba for the Atlas 2027 Project. We've had a few author meetings and work is about to commence in earnest on that landmark work, but in terms of exciting social media content, it just amounts to writing time at the desk for now. I am excited about it though, because I know the content well enough to be the chosen author and I can be a decent writer when I set my mind to it - this chapter on Cretaceous Manitoba just might be my career masterpiece... or, it might just be the jumping off point to finally writing my book? 🤔

We continue to document oil index fossils in the stratigraphic horizons of the Boyne Member of the Carlile Formation, such as the red algae fossil pictured here. These fossils are useful to the oil and gas industry in locating oil and gas plays, while also being quite the paleoecological marvel. This particular fossil is small, only about the size of a quarter. But it sets the stage on which we can envision large marine reptiles... for red algae only grows within a certain depth range, within a certain temperature range, salinity range, etc. These figures teach us about the paleoenvironment of the Boyne Sea, in which large sharks dominated the top of the food chain, at least regionally, before the mosasaur dominance of the overlying Pierre Shale.

We are also writing our annual reports for the Provincial government, and outlining our strategies for the 2025 field season. Our company is a few years old now, and has started finding it's niche, so we're reevaluating some aspects of our business model to better suit the direction we're heading. Geological consultation and heritage impact assessments are in high demand, and we're still excited about the styxosaur waiting out there under the snow. Stay tuned for updates on our website and social media throughout the spring.

In the meantime, we'll make a better effort to keep up with this page during the exciting winter season of writing & reporting, and thank you for continuing to follow our time travels throughout prehistoric Manitoba!

12/16/2024

My thoughts, exactly!

Enjoyed watching at the cinema this week. A fun Christmas movie.

The palaeontologist in me loved the fact that Santa's reindeer were essentially the giant Ice Age deer, Megaloceros. Yup, the extinct deer with 12 ft wide antlers!

Did anybody else think the same? Surely, I can't be the only one. 😅

Maybe it was due to Dwayne The Rock Johnson love of dinosaurs and fossils that we got a Megaloceros? 🦌 🦖🦌

Artwork by Mario Lanzas.

11/28/2024

This is so cool!

68-million-year-old fossil egg found in Antarctica reveals marine reptile reproduction secrets, challenging evolutionary assumptions

11/04/2024

And that's a wrap on 2024! 🎬

The field season concluded at our new Styxosaurus site, clearing an access path, removing overburden, collecting loose material while protecting in-situ fossils from winter elements. The climax of the day, and really the whole season, came with one swift stroke of the brush... and there it was! A perfectly preserved, dislodged plesiosaur tooth with root! The apex of the crown is missing a small fleck, but the striations are amazingly preserved. We can barely contain our excitement about this plesiosaur, as it not only excites us professionally, but personally as well. The styxosaur site is cool.

Looking back over our 2024 season, it turned out differently than we had originally planned. We were itching to hit the ground running at our turtle site from last year, but wet conditions in the spring pushed it back to midsummer. By that time we were deeply engaged in geological consulting for the private sector, which really dominated our field time throughout the 2024 season. Our public fossil digs were successful, but as you could tell from a quiet social media this year, they took a backseat to the consultation side of our business.

As our young company continues to grow, it's definitely finding it's niche and we're happy with the direction it's going. As paleontologists who spend so much time in the deep past, we are also optimistic about the present state of vertebrate paleontology in Manitoba and look forward to the future!

10/06/2024

I ❤️ the Gammon Ferrigunious! I even have a cool shirt that says so.

Today I fell in love with it all over again. It began as a simple journey into the backcountry to examine some outcrops which I had previously identified... but deep in the bush, my GPS signal was bouncing around and I took the wrong fork in the creek... and just as the poem says, taking the path less traveled makes all the difference! Actually there wasn't a path at all. Just thick bush, creeks and then, outcrops!

The first one belonged to the Boyne Member of the Carlile Formation. I'm old friends with the Boyne, but it's too far down section of the Gammon, however just near the top of the outcrop, something looked suspiciously 'gammonous' so rather than turn around and retrace my steps to try and find the correct fork of the creek, I followed my geological nose further into the deep bush, following the logic that since I'm hiking upstream, future outcrops that I might encounter should, in theory, be approaching the formational contact with the Pierre Shale. And my faith in geology proved well placed! As I rounded a sharp bend in this new creek country, suddenly there it was... The Gammon Ferruginous Member of the Pierre Shale, sitting conformably atop the Boyne Member of the Carlile Formation. Textbook style stratigraphy. And there was lateral bentonite seams WITHIN the Gammon! I've only ever encountered thin bentonite (~1-3 cm) in the Upper Unit of the Gammon Ferrigunious and at one other site that I found just last year, where it was on par with that which I discovered today.

As I pressed yet further into the bush, my knack for sniffing out this unique sedimentary layer continued to manifest, as a short distance upstream I found an even larger exposure, with multiple lateral bentonite layers, WITHIN the Gammon.

The literature suggests that the Gammon Ferrigunious has three distinct units: upper, middle, and lower. These were identified from oil wells in the 1970s and 'suggested' from electric logs of the subsurface conducted in 1980, but never identified in outcrop in the Pembina Mountain area until 2010, when I identified it during a Xiphactinus excavation along with some friends at the Manitoba Geological Survey. (Sorry for the lack of references here, I'm just going by memory but you can message me for references if you're interested.)

I've spent countless man-hours in all three units, so I'm extremely familiar with them; in fact I'm the industry field expert on the Gammon Ferrigunious of Manitoba. So that is why I'm pretty excited that these outcrops simply do not match up with any of the three units that I'm familiar with... I've developed an eye for it, the feel for it, the field skills for it, to say with certainty that this outcrop is stratigraphically absolutely the Gammon Ferrigunious Member of the Pierre Shale; but it is also different in it's physical properties than any of the three recognized units that I am familiar with. It's hard for carbonaceous shale! The lateral bentonite layers are new. The Gammon is conformably overlain by the "I" Beds of the Pembina Member. Everything is correct, it's just my field experience talking that this Gammon is somehow physically different from the recognized three units. Yet there it is!

In 14 years of hunting this shale out of the Manitoba Escarpment, just when I thought I had it nailed, ol' Mother Earth is showing me that we're actually just getting started on unraveling the mysteries of this elusive chapter from Prehistoric Manitoba!

As I hiked back to the truck, I kept hearing Yoda's voice in my head saying, "Much to learn, you still have." And learn it, I will. And that is exactly why I do what I do. I'm genuinely curious about this, I want to solve the riddle of whether the Pembina Mountain region of the Manitoba Escarpment actually has four, or more, units of the Gammon? And what are the unique characteristics of these new exposures? The bentonite is also interesting, again this is just field experience talking, not geochemical analysis: this bentonite in the Gammon more closely resembles the bentonite of the underlying Boyne Member of the Carlile Formation, rather than the calcium bentonite of the overlying Pembina Member of the Pierre Shale. As the Gammon and it's bentonite are in fact the basal Member of the Pierre, I would have expected it's bentonite to be more Pembina-esque, as the shale is. But it looks and feels closer to Boyne bentonite. Interesting geological crossover. If we can source the new Gammon bentonite to it's volcanic origin, we may be able to answer some questions of deposition and stratigraphic correlation to other bentonite horizons of the Gammon closer to the type locality in the United States, which in turn would provide us with a view of which part of the larger Gammon sequence across the Great Plains that our little snapshot of geology has captured for us to study along the Manitoba Escarpment.

There was something special about the orange color of ferrigunious shale on a beautiful October day during peak leaf season in Manitoba's Pembina Valley that added to the ambiance of my geological journey.

It was a good day. ⛏️

09/28/2024

Styxosaurus snowii, a very large long-necked plesiosaur that inhabited the Western Interior Seaway for approximately 12 million years during the Campanian Stage of the Cretaceous Period, has been on our bucket list of skeletons we would like to eventually have the experience to excavate, and today we hit the jackpot!

This elusive marine reptile has been found in Manitoba before; in fact, we've found isolated vertebrae in the Gammon Ferruginous and Pembina Members of the Pierre Shale throughout our careers, but we haven't ever found an in-situ styxosaur skeleton. Manitoba is about the northernmost limit of their geographic distribution, and even then, they were outnumbered by short-necked polycotilid plesiosaurs, and subsequently the entire Plesiosauria was, in turn, vastly outnumbered by mosasaurs. In essence, they were in Manitoba, but they weren't very common.

Today we followed up on a lead from the Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival and it's a great thing we did!! A local landowner discovered this vertebra centrum and brought it to our attention. From his verbal description at the festival, we expected it might be a tylosaur, but immediately upon seeing it today, we noticed the distinctive elasomosaurine features, and it's massive size! The landowner also had a bucket of other fragments from which we quickly articulated a podial flipper, and identified pelvic and pectoral girdle fragments! The preservation quality of these is amazing for the Pierre Shale, and so we headed out to the field to see where this amazing specimen came from, and we just couldn't be more thrilled! Geographically, it sits farther west than the typical Pierre exposure, yet is in line with our other primary research locality, adding to our hypothesis that many untapped Pembina bentonite sequences remain along the western flank of the Manitoba Escarpment!

The fall weather was perfect, the fossils were beyond anything we had hoped for, the landowners are amazing and it was the best field day of our 2024 season!

We'll be hitting the plesiosaur literature hard this winter (the taxonomy and phylogeny of plesiosaurs can be greuling), and planning this expedition very tediously, as this isn't just another fun big mosasaur skeleton, of which there are many; this is an ultra-rare taxon of significant scientific significance. And that is why the landowner came to us.

Stay tuned as this exciting story continues...

09/08/2024

We crawled out of the ravine this weekend, showered off the fossil dust, got all civil looking, and went to have an exciting fun-filled day sharing Manitoba's prehistory at the Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival in beautiful Manitou, Manitoba!

In our 3rd consecutive year at this event, we've officially become known as the table to bring your fossils to for identification, and this year we had a wealth of information to share and receive. We find this festival unique for us in that there is a true symbiosis; as we identify your discoveries, the information that you share back with us often leads to bigger adventures! Today we reconnected with a few familiar landowners, rubbed political shoulders with our local MLA, talked about dinosaurs with kids and adults from all across the region, all while meeting with local news media, talking with a PhD candidate about a really exciting new collaboration AND someone shared with us an amazing new invertebrate from the Pierre Shale which will certainly prove to be new genus, new species, first occurrence, etc. Much work remains to be done, but we're pretty excited to be a part of it!

Yes, discoveries often happen in the field, but many of our most interesting discoveries have been discovered by people like you who have chosen to share your treasures with us at the festival. We can't thank you enough, and as always, the supper was amazing! Thank you to the host committee and all the volunteers for another fantastic event, and we look forward to following up on some promising new leads this fall!

🐝 🌰 🍁 🦖