Keenan's Blogiddy Blog

by Allan April - Writer, and Laura Lyall - CTV News Atlantic Videographer Published Monday, August 10, 2020 9:55PM ADT CAPE ENRAGE, N.B. -- With its spectacular views of the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick's Cape Enrage is a popular tourist destination. But some recent discoveries of the ancient variety have researchers exploring the area. Researchers from the New Brunswick Museum are searching for ancient signs of life along the base of the seaside cliffs of Cape Enrage, N.B. “Often we’re walking a beach, we might see something different,” explains Olivia King, a research associate with the New Brunswick Museum. “We may see a recent rock fall that happened, and at that point, we usually stop, take a minute, flip over a couple of rocks.” In doing so, the team has made a major discovery -- the first evidence of ancient animal life found at the location. Fossilized footprints of amphibians, reptiles, horseshoe crabs, giant...

Good morning to all. I'm sure a whole lot of you are starting to feel the tug to go out, but in these strange times is proving to be difficult due to the circumstances. With being at home gave me a bit more time to work on side projects and catch up on my blog. Thus, in the spirit of being stuck home, I'll be posting a few of my past ventures and trips. Lets dial this one a few years back. Olivia In July 2017 I had gone out on a field trip in Northern New Brunswick. This is part of field on behalf of the New Brunswick Museum. I joined Matt and Olivia on field work to check the Clifton site to see how it had progressed and the state of the cliffs. If you want to find out more about Cliftion, you can search my blog site for past posts that has a lot more details on the site and the type of work going on there (ie. morphology, formations, composition, stratigraphy, etc. Matt Clifton is amazing when it comes to the specimens that come out of that place. ...

Excerpt taken from YouTube description: Dr. Don Brinkman, Curator Emeritus at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, discusses the challenges of trying to identify isolated elements of fossil fish, and the use of new technology that gives us further insight into the history of teleost fishes. One of Dr. Brinkman’s long-term projects has been to try to understand the role of teleost fishes in Alberta’s freshwater communities during the Cretaceous Period. Teleosts are large ray-finned fishes that are well represented by fossils in the sediments laid down from ancient rivers flowing across Alberta. It is rare to find articulated fish specimens (whole skeletons preserved as they were in life). Fishes are more commonly represented in the fossil record by isolated bones. Known as microfossils, they are often difficult to identify as belonging to specific groups. Technology has made it possible to study fossil skeletons in new ways. Micro CT scanners allow very small fossils to be digitally exami...

from Jessica Doria-Brown (CBC) 'To think that you had something in your hands that could be this old' Click this link to view the video within article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-fossil-museum-heritage-foundation-1.5416597https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-fossil-museum-heritage-foundation-1.5416597?fbclid=IwAR1aJeRsIL67H_HCUxOB-Bxbkp6teQBYBT2tk9aHlDHhgtHMBZ1fdYmu-R8 An Island couple is donating a 300-million-year-old fossil to the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation. The pair discovered the rock — with amphibian footprints — while strolling along the beach in the Cumberland area in July. The fossil was found on a loose rock on the ground. "I just looked down and saw this stone and it had prints on it," said Pat Sweet. "It was quite amazing actually, to think that you had something in your hands that could be this old. It was quite amazing really, we just couldn't believe it," said Bob Sweet...

from Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald (CBC) A 300 million year old animal was preserved huddled around a juvenile in a den in a hollow tree. Maddin’s team recently discovered an adult and juvenile fossils of a varanopid synapsid — one of the earliest animals on the mammalian evolutionary lineage — inside a lithified tree stump on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. (Henry Sharpe) Click this link for Radio audio clip within article: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jan-11-fires-in-australia-cuttlefish-watch-3d-movies-coal-pollution-harms-crops-and-more-1.5418816/cape-breton-fossils-are-the-oldest-evidence-of-parental-behaviour-1.5418828 More than 300 million years ago, a lizard-like creature more closely related to mammals than reptiles died in what is now Cape Breton, N.S. with its tail curled around what was likely its offspring. The team of Canadian researchers who found and analyzed the fossil think this is the earliest evidence of parenting behaviour yet identifi...

CBC's The Nature of Things is airing its documentary 'First Animals', a look into early life Friday, October 25th, 2019 at 9 PM on CBC-TV. - First Animals episode description on CBC's website. Here are links to several of their blog posts: Meet the weird, wacky and wonderful creatures that lived in Cambrian seas over 500 million years ago - by Graham Duggan High in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, the animals of an ancient ecosystem can be seen battling for life. The fossils of the Burgess Shale offer a glimpse at the incredible diversity of early life on Earth, frozen in time and locked in stone — you just have to go digging to see it. ( Click here for more... ) The ROM quarry site high up in the Rocky Mountains. Paleontologist scales the Rocky Mountains to uncover Earth’s very first animals - by Jean-Bernard Caron, Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum It’s 6:53 a.m. on Aug. 19, 2019. My body is primed to wake up — ...

One site I've been going to since I started rock hunting is Rockport, located between Dorchester and Sackville, New Brunswick. The more I go the more interesting things I find. Slacks Cove is full of places you can stumble upon cool rocks, fossils, or dead animals such as a half eaten seal.. burk! Reaching Dorchester the road splits between 106 (towards Sackville) and the 935 towards Dorchester Cape. I take the 935 south and drive a few minutes until the paved road turns into a dirt road. A few hundred meters from where the road changed I stop my car and park it on the side of the road where the old road cuts into a new one the government constructed last year. I've stopped a few times but didn't had the chance to check these red cliffs. I've spotted some fossil plants but very sparse. There's also a lot of big boulder-size conglomerate rocks all over the place, standing out amidst the red silt. What I had to cross to get to the beach. The tide a...

by Emily Chung Cambroraster was similar in some ways to lampreys, stingrays and horseshoe crabs. When paleontologists first spotted the large spaceship-like fossils in B.C.'s Kootenay National Park, "we really didn't know what to make of it," recalls Joseph Moysiuk, part of the excavation team. (Andrew Gregg/Red Trillium Films) A new fossil species named after an iconic starship is both unlike anything that exists today and uncannily similar to many modern animals, from stingrays to horseshoe crabs. When paleontologists first spotted the large, round shield-like fossils in B.C.'s Kootenay National Park, "we really didn't know what to make of it," recalls Joseph Moysiuk, part of the excavation team. "We nicknamed it 'The spaceship'... because we thought it looked a lot like the Millennium Falcon," he added, referring to Han Solo's iconic ship in the Star Wars series. It became more than a nickname — the creature's fo...

[Personal note: The UNESCO team has been on site these past few days and I'm sure they're amazed by what they've seen. You can visit the Cliffs of Fundy Aspiring Global Geopark facebook page -- https://www.facebook.com/fundygeopark/ -- to get updates. Let's hope that they'll join the Canadian Geopark family¹!] from The Chronicle Herald - published June 25th Evaluators from UNESCO will be in Cumberland and Colchester counties in late July to evaluate the proposed Cliffs of Fundy Aspiring Geopark as a potential UNESCO Global Geopark. - Tourism Nova Scotia Maybe we should turn left at Truro once in a while. Many, if not most, Haligonians escaping the city on a summer road trip just sail through the hub city on their way north to P.E.I., New Brunswick or central Canada, or east to answer Cape Breton’s siren call. There are highway signs, though, that tease the knowing traveller west, to places like the beguili...

by Chris O'Neill-Yates · CBC News · Posted: Jul 22, 2019 Fossils from Mistaken Point and Bonavista give researchers unparalleled look at origins of life. Jack Matthews, a research fellow at the University of Oxford's Museum of Natural History, stands next to a display showcasing fossils that document the story of the beginning of animal life on earth. (Chris O'Neill-Yates/CBC) Jack Matthews, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, strides across the lawn in front of the Museum of Natural History at Oxford University with a broad smile on his face. His excitement about fossils — which have become his life's work — is contagious. The Latin names of ancient life-forms preserved in rock drop effortlessly from his tongue as he climbs the stairs in the imposing three-storey neo-Gothic building to Animals First, an exhibition tracing the origins of animal life on earth. "It's like tracing your family tree back to your very earliest ancestors,...