Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC's Fossils

By VivienLougheed

What began as a hunting trip to British Columbia’s Northern Rockies in 2000 turns into one of the province’s most important fossil finds – the Monroe Dinosaur Trackway in Kakwa Provincial Park. In Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils, Vivien Lougheed tells the fascinating tale of the trackway’s discovery and, in the telling, weaves in stories of other major fossil finds in British Columbia and across North America, many of which demonstrate how egos, turf wars and a lack of resources diminish the science of paleontology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creekstone Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781928195030

Book preview

Sidetracked Cover_Rounded.jpg

Copyright © 2011 Vivien Lougheed

Originally published by Creekstone Press, 7456 Driftwood Road, Smithers BC ,V0J 2N7, Canada, www.creekstonepress.com

Electronic publication by Repository Press, 137 Lyon St. S., Prince George BC, V2M3K7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher (or in the case of photocopying in Canada, without a license from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). Reviewers, however, are welcome to quote brief passages.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lougheed, Vivien

        Sidetracked: the struggle for BC’s fossils / by Vivien Lougheed.

ISBN 978-0-9783195-5-7

1. Fraser, Garnet (Garnet Douglas). 

2. Dinosaur tracks–British Columbia–Kakwa Provincial Park.

3. Paleontology–British Columbia–Kakwa Provincial Park. 

Editor: Lynn Shervill

Cover design: Hans Saefkow

The cover photo, taken by Sheldon Clare, shows the Monroe Dinosaur Trackway in Kakwa Provincial Park

Map: Carol Fairhurst

CONTENTS

Foreword

Geological Time Scale

Map

Introduction

Chapter 1 — Trackways

Kakwa Provincial Park 2000

Tumbler Ridge 2000

Chapter 2 — Reading the Past

Chapter 3 — Five Stories

Sue the T-rex

Nate Murphy

Canada Fossils

Sharon Hubbard

McAbee Fossil Beds

Chapter 4 — Letter of the Law

Letter of the Law

Self-governance

Chapter 5 — Exposed to the Elements

Tumbler Ridge 2001

Kakwa 2002/2003

Narraway River

Wapiti

Peace River

Line Creek

Graham River

Chapter 6 — To Tell or Not To Tell

Len Barteaux

Al Lakusta

Harry Morrison

Chapter 7 — Turf Wars

Tumbler Ridge 2002/2003

Kakwa 2003/2004

Tumbler Ridge 2004

Kakwa 2004

Prince George 2004

The Schultings

Pete Shaw

Chapter 8 —Squeezed Out

Chapter 9 — The Swat Team

Chapter 10 — Bones of Contention

Tumbler Ridge 2005

Tumbler Ridge 2006

Kakwa/Tumbler Ridge 2007

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

References

Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this

foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood.

—Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard paleontologist

FOREWORD

This book is a triumph of investigative journalism – even though I doubt its author thinks of herself as either a journalist or an investigator. She has tackled a minefield of contradictions and conflicts. Who should collect fossils? Who is qualified to excavate ancient bones, shells or plants? Should fossils on public land be treated differently from those on private property? Is it appropriate to buy or sell fossils? And should these questions be legislated and policed or left to local custom?

Unfortunately, these questions and many more like them have led to serious conflicts, court battles, and in at least one case, prison (though not in British Columbia). In its simplest guise, the conflict pits dedicated amateurs (perhaps collecting on weekends or vacation) against professional paleontologists (professors or museum curators). The amateur wants help with identifications and maybe some credit for the find. The professional may want to be able to prepare and study the fossils and perhaps publish papers about them. It could be a win-win balance.

But behind this seemingly simple scenario lie innumerable points of friction and conflict. I remember some of my colleagues in paleontology complaining bitterly a few years ago about a popular book about fossils that gave detailed directions to good collecting localities. My friends didn’t want good localities messed up – this despite the fact that over the years amateurs have been responsible for most of the really important fossil finds, for the simple reason that only amateurs can afford the time it takes to find the rarest species.

Lougheed has delved deeply into a nest of such problems involving BC fossils – most notably the spectacularly preserved tracks of dinosaurs in Kakwa Provincial Park. And she has done a splendid job of putting these incidents in a broader context of BC and Alberta paleontology as well as cases farther afield – including Pete Larson’s prison term in South Dakota. Partly because the broader context is so well developed, this book should be required reading for all amateur fossil collectors and, especially, the professionals. I am not aware of any treatment as broad or as balanced as this one.

DAVID RAUP (RETIRED UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PALEONTOLOGIST AND A FORMER CURATOR OF THE FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, CHICAGO) WASHINGTON ISLAND, WISCONSIN

MAY, 2011

GEOLOGICAL TIMESCALE

Eons are the largest unit of geological time and are broken down into eras, periods and epochs or ages.

Precambrian Supereon - 4,500 to 570 million years ago (mya)

Hadean Eon - 4500 to 3800 mya

Archaean Eon - 3800 to 2500 mya

Proterozoic Eon - 2500 to 570 mya

Paleoproterozoic Era (early) - 2500 to 1600 mya

Mesoproterozoic Era (middle) - 1600 to 900 mya

Neoproterozoic Era (late) - 900 to 570 mya

Phanerozoic Eon - 570 mya to present

Paleozoic Era - 570 to 245 mya

Cambrian period - 570 to 505 mya

Tommotian age - 530 to 527 mya

Ordovician period - 505 to 438 mya

Silurian period - 438 to 408 mya

Devonian period - 408 to 360 mya

Carboniferous period - 360 to 296 mya

Mississippian age (early) - 360 to 320 mya

Pennsylvanian age (late) - 320 to 296 mya

Permian period - 296 to 245 mya

Mesozoic Era - 245 to 66.4 mya

Triassic period - 245 to 206 mya

Jurassic period - 206 to 144 mya

Cretaceous period - 144 to 66.4 mya

Valanginian age - 138 to 131 mya

Cenomanian age - 97.5 to 91 mya

Cenozoic Era - 66.4 mya to today

Tertiary period - 66.4 to 1.6 mya

Paleocene age - 66.4 to 57.8 mya

Eocene age - 57.8 to 36.6 mya

Oligocene age - 36.6 to 23.7 mya

Miocene age - 23.7 to 5.3 mya

Pliocene age - 5.3 to 1.6 mya

Quaternary period - 1.6 mya to today

Pleistocene age - 1.6 mya to 10,000 years ago

Holocene age - 10,000 years ago to today

Sidetracked%20Map.jpg

INTRODUCTION

Seeing a lawyer’s name on my call display made me nervous. I knew of no wealthy relatives who might be leaving me a fortune. More likely, I was being dinged for the funeral expenses of some destitute cousin or uncle. Or maybe I’d made a libelous statement in a book or magazine article. It was March 2007 and Prince George, BC, lawyer Glen Nicholson, a loquacious kind of guy, instantly dispelled my anxiety.

It’s a social call, he said.

After exchanging short anecdotes about hiking and skiing, pastimes we both enjoyed, he suggested I write a book about a client of his, a local medical doctor, hiker, hunter and, most recently, amateur paleontologist.

According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, a paleontologist is someone who studies the forms of life existing in former geologic periods, as represented by fossil animals and plants. Dr. Garnet Fraser, according to Nicholson, was an amateur one of these. That status, along with the fact he and his friend, Bryan Monroe, had discovered an ancient and important dinosaur trackway in a remote part of northeastern British Columbia, Canada, was causing him no end of trouble, some of it legal.

A few days later Fraser and I sat in my kitchen sipping herbal tea and sizing each other up through small talk while my husband, John, confident that I was wasting time on another local cause when I should be writing the Great Canadian Novel, disappeared into his basement office.

Fraser looked about 35 years old. He had sandy blond hair and penetrating brown eyes. His soft voice and non-assuming manner masked a confidence that became evident when he spoke. His muscular, five-foot-ten-inch build glowed with health. His clothes were meticulous – his blue shirt was ironed crisp and matched his pants. He smiled often but he was guarded too.

I asked how he found the trackway and scribbled notes as he explained. His attention to detail frustrated me but I knew it would ultimately make any writing easier should I decide to tell this tale. When he left, I assured him I’d think seriously about his story. I liked it so far and I liked him.

It took only a few days of curious web surfing and nightly brooding to commit to the project. What piqued my curiosity and finalized my decision were the numerous interesting stories I found – stories showing how the science of paleontology is often impeded by personal and political conflicts and how, occasionally, these conflicts can be avoided or resolved.

All the stories had a common theme. Science works best when the human factor is eliminated from observation and experiment. Scientists are expected to maintain objectivity, to avoid fudging research, grasping for publicity and obstructing the work of others. For the general public, stories about such behaviours are interesting, comic even, since humour is based on deflating the ego and bringing down the mighty. But for scientists, such stories are hard to laugh at. They represent failure.

I discovered that the history of paleontology is rife with such failures, from the attempts of early paleontologists to acquire status by favouring creationist interpretations to an attempt in the 1990s by Society of Vertebrate Paleontology scientists to get control of the most complete, fossilized skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever found.

Perhaps one of the most famous and damaging battles for scientific recognition was waged by Edward Cope and Othneil Marsh, two natural history scientists who, from the 1870s through the 1890s, high-graded fossil records of the American West, resorting to theft, bribery and the reckless destruction of bones in their ego-driven attempts to outdo one another. Such was their passion to claim paleontological supremacy that they even resorted to slandering each other in scientific publications.

Another of these failures is connected to a peculiar feature of paleontology – its ongoing dependence on amateurs who find most of the fossils the professionals need for study. Take, for instance, the story of Mary Anning who was born in Lyme Regis, England, in 1799.

She was just 11 years old when she made her first important find.

Anning’s story began on the Dorset coast in western England where she and her older brother Joseph made a meager living finding and selling curiosities, as fossils were called then. One day, while walking the beach after a powerful storm, Anning’s brother noticed that gouging waves had dislodged some rocks from the base of a cliff revealing what looked like the skull of an especially large crocodile. Anning knew from experience that a fossil find in the cliff meant more fossilized remains immediately below, under the sand and gravel of the beach. The children dug and found the rest of the skeleton, a giant marine reptile called an ichthyosaur, mostly intact. After carefully hauling it out and putting it together, a skill learned from their father, they offered the ichthyosaur for sale, knowing full well it would be instantly snapped up by the gentry and nobility, some of whom were scientists. The fossil was purchased for £23 by Henry Host Henley of Norfolk who donated it to the William Bullock’s Museum of Natural History in Piccadilly. A description of it appeared in the Royal Society’s publication Philosophical Transactions.

In subsequent years, numerous other fossils – including two distinct species of ichthyosaur, the complete skeleton of a previously unknown animal named a plesiosaur, a pterodactyl (a flying reptile) and the first complete skeleton of a pterosaur – were found, extracted, assembled and sold by Anning. But she didn’t just skillfully extract and assemble skeletons. She made drawings of her finds and had them engraved. So exacting was her work that it took her 10 years, using basic tools under difficult conditions, to extract the plesiosaur. It still sits in the Museum of Natural History in London where professionals can see the skill with which this uneducated amateur worked.

Anning also had a keen eye for anatomical detail. She was reputed to have observed, for example, that her ichthyosaur could not be a crocodile, as one scientist claimed, because her fossil had the same nasal passages as a bird. Within a dozen years of her first major find, scientists were searching her out for other discoveries. Many of the scientific observations she made and provided to those scientists were claimed as their own even though some of Anning’s theories were in conflict with popular beliefs.

In those days the professionals were bent on establishing a creationist explanation for fossils. Observations not in accord with this often resulted in controversy and caused trouble for the observer. The standard theory of creation was simple: the earth was about 6000 years old and stories of Noah’s flood explained the presence of fossils on the tops of mountains. The theory stated that the fossils were mineralized and compacted by the weight of the water. When the water receded, layers of rock containing the fossils were visible on cliffs and mountains and were believed to be akin to bathtub rings.

The wording in Genesis 1:25 was taken to mean that species were immutable. And God made the beasts of the earth after his kind and the cattle after their kind and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind. And God saw that it was good. It was generally accepted that each kind is separate and distinct and did not derive from earlier kinds. This, in turn, indicated that every species was still around, including the strange animals found by Anning and other fossil hunters. People didn’t believe in extinction since that would suggest that God’s creations could be flawed. Even today there are a few scientists around who look for creationist interpretations of the fossil record. Dr. Emil Silvestru, a Romanian geologist and ardent Christian, investigated some trackways in the Tumbler Ridge area on the request of two creationist families who thought they might be human prints. The quality of the prints prevented a definitive interpretation.

As knowledge increased, a secular version of Genesis, one that sounds familiar even now, developed. This version is revealed in various popular science books written by known atheists and dissenters. The most popular of these books during Anning’s time were those of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the infinitely more famous Charles. Erasmus Darwin’s speculations were presented in a series of poems published in the 1790s. His ideas were not original; he was no scientist like his grandson, but a reader and synthesizer. He believed in the idea of a big-bang creation. He believed in the idea of elements combining and inter-reacting to form compounds like water. He envisioned the early earth as a seething hot laboratory producing new compounds, a reverse of labs in his own time where the chemists were zapping, smashing and heating compounds to break them down into elements. He pictured the oceans condensing out of the clouds as the earth cooled. Darwin speculated that rocks were formed by the cooling of lava and the compaction of organic matter under the oceans over huge periods of time (more than 6000 years!). Earthquakes mixed the strata. Darwin also espoused an early version of the drift theory, noting that the shapes of continents suggest they all, at one time, fitted together and have since been split and driven apart.

As scientists took up the ideas contained in the works of their great predecessors and popularized by synthesizers like Erasmus Darwin, Anning’s work became more and more appreciated. When a certain Lady Harriet Silvester of London came to purchase some curiosities in 1824, she was so impressed with Anning, she noted in her diary that "by reading and application she has arrived to that greater degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever