11 minute read
Fine Feathered (Fossil) Friends
LOOKING AT THE BIG
PICTURE
Museum Purchases IMAX Theatre
By Erika Stenson Head of Marketing, Sales and Business Development
As part of our long-term planning to modernize the Royal BC Museum precinct, the museum purchased the IMAX Victoria from Destination Cinema Inc. in August 2020. By bringing IMAX Victoria under museum control, we ensure that the potential redevelopment process for the Belleville site won’t be impacted by a private lease agreement down the road. The BC government and the museum are working together on the plan for the future museum facilities.
In the meantime, we are happy to have the IMAX staff, annual pass holders and visitors as an official part of our museum community. IMAX will continue to show the documentary features and Hollywood films visitors have come to expect, and the overall experience will remain largely unchanged.
“This is an exciting step for the Royal BC Museum’s modernization,” said Professor Jack Lohman, museum CEO. “Bringing IMAX Victoria into the museum operation opens up more educational opportunities as we work to update the museum.”
Now that the province is in Phase Three of recovery planning for the COVID-19 pandemic, the IMAX theatre is open with enhanced safety measures, including a maximum capacity of 50 visitors.
To see the IMAX film schedule and book your tickets visit rbcm.ca/imax.
McAbee Fossil Beds is a Provincial Heritage Site located east of Cache Creek, British Columbia.
McAbee Fossil Beds
Kamloops
Victoria Vancouver
By Dr. Victoria Arbour
Curator of Palaeontology
FINE FEATHERED (FOSSIL) FRIENDS
In 2017, the Royal BC Museum palaeontology collection received more than 18,000 fossils from the 53-million-year old McAbee Fossil Beds site, near Kamloops.
Donated by the Leahy and Langevin families and representing years of work by the late John Leahy and David Langevin, these fossils were formed in an ancient upland lake during a period of time called the Eocene. It was a time of high temperatures worldwide, with forests covering what is now the Canadian High Arctic. Eocene fossils are of great interest to scientists studying the effects of climate change and how warm global climates influenced the evolution of plants and animals. The fossils from McAbee include beautifully preserved leaves and flowers, abundant insects of all sorts, rare spiders, crayfish, fish and even bird feathers.
Getting these fossils packed up and brought safely to the Royal BC Museum was a herculean effort orchestrated by former palaeontology collections manager Marji Johns and former objects conservator Kjerstin Mackie. But the story doesn’t stop with the arrival of the fossils at the museum—in fact, it’s just the beginning! Since joining the museum as the new curator (continued on the next page)
(above) Palaeontology volunteer Dazhong Huang unwraps fossils from the Leahy-Langevin donation, placing them onto a foam-lined cabinet drawer.
(centre) Delicate feathers from the McAbee Fossil Beds are preserved on small slabs of rock and stored in the Royal BC Museum’s palaeontology collection.
(right) Alexis Bazinet, NSERC Undergraduate Research Award recipient, analyzes microscopic features of fossilized feathers from the Leahy-Langevin collection at her home in Prince George. Photograph courtesy of Adrienne Fortsch.
Thank you to the Leahy and Langevin families for this extraordinary contribution to the Royal BC Museum and the people of British Columbia.
of palaeontology in 2018, I’ve been working with museum staff and volunteers to make these specimens accessible for scientific research and to share their stories with the people of British Columbia.
Over a dozen volunteers in the palaeontology collection have helped us unpack each individual fossil from its protective wrapping paper and bubble wrap, carefully placing the fossils into foam-lined drawers in cabinets. Former contract collections manager Jaclyn Richmond and contract conservator Katie McEvoy spent countless hours entering data for each specimen into a spreadsheet, giving each fossil its own unique catalogue number and recording who collected it and where it came from. Volunteers diligently painted small white lines onto the edges of the fossils, preparing a spot for Jaclyn and Katie to write these catalogue numbers in special archivalquality ink.
Each box of fossils contained an interesting mix of plants, fish, insects and more. In the palaeontology collection, we organize our fossils by geological age and biological taxonomy, so that researchers studying plants can find the plant fossils quickly, those studying fish can find the fish fossils quickly, and so on. Sorting through more than 18,000 fossils is a time-consuming process, and here volunteers came to the rescue again. First, all of the plants, insects, fish and feathers were sorted into their own drawers and cabinets, and then the volunteers began learning how to identify the many different plant species found at McAbee. Drawers of gingko and redwood leaves, pine needles, flowers, seeds, cones, and more began to fill up, and I was continually impressed with the good humour and curiosity of the palaeontology volunteers in taking on this huge task. Identifying fossils isn’t always easy, but there were always interesting problems to solve and things to discover!
The last of the Leahy-Langevin collection fossils were unpacked on February 14, 2020, just a few weeks before the museum had to close its doors because of the COVID-19 pandemic. By that point, volunteers had contributed over 900 hours to processing the collection! Although the museum closure meant we had to pause projects like sorting the fossils, it didn’t mean work on these fossils stopped completely. Instead, the focus shifted to studying some of the fossils in the collection in detail.
Fossilized wings, including feathers, from RBCM.EH2017.050.0024, a relative of modern loons and part of the Leahy-Langevin collection of fossils from the McAbee Fossil Beds. By measuring the size and spacing of feather barbs and barbules, Alexis hopes to discover more about the ecology of the birds that made the McAbee Fossil Beds their home 53 million years ago.
Enter Alexis Bazinet, a recent graduate of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria. Alexis received a prestigious Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Undergraduate Student Research Award to work with me at the museum during the summer of 2020. Originally Alexis was going to work in the collection, assisting with sorting and cataloguing fossils and studying fossil feathers. COVID-19 meant we had to pivot quickly to find a way to do this work safely—and that meant remotely.
Alexis and I have spent the summer investigating the beautifully preserved fossil feathers in the Leahy-Langevin collection—a great fit for my background in dinosaur anatomy and diversity, since birds are the feathery descendants of dinosaurs! Feathers are delicate and rarely fossilize, but we have nearly 150 feathers in the collection. As far as I know, this is the largest number of fossil feathers from a single palaeontological site anywhere in North America. But what species of birds are represented by these isolated feathers?
We only have two partial bird skeletons from McAbee in the collection: a small perching bird and something that might be a very ancient loon. But there were surely more types of birds in British Columbia 53 million years ago. Tiny features of feathers—little branching pieces called barbs and barbules—can provide some clues, since barb and barbule sizes and densities are distinct for different kinds of birds. At the museum, using a powerful microscope with a built-in digital camera, I’ve photographed many of these feathers at high magnification. Then, thanks to the internet, I can send these photos instantly to Alexis at her home in Prince George, where she can measure and analyze them using special image-analysis software.
Our feather study is still ongoing at the time of this writing, but Alexis has already found that many of the isolated feathers from McAbee share more in common with birds that would have been living in trees, like sparrows and warblers, than with aquatic birds like ducks or loons. This is a surprising result, since we expected to find more aquatic birds in an ancient lake deposit! Hopefully, as Alexis continues to crunch the data, we’ll be able to find out even more about the biodiversity of Eocene birds in British Columbia. I am looking forward to eventually welcoming back our volunteers, students and researchers to continue the work on this important fossil collection. There are still thousands of fossils to catalogue, and lots of work to identify and sort not just the plant fossils, but the insects (of which there are many!) and fish. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what we can learn from the Leahy-Langevin collection, and there are undoubtedly many new species and interesting scientific discoveries to be made using these fossils!
The McAbee Fossil Beds is a protected Provincial Heritage Site and is managed by the Bonaparte Indian Band. Fossils cannot be collected from the site without a permit from the Fossil Resources Office of the Heritage Branch.
Research funding was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Learn more about the McAbee Fossil Beds on the Learning Portal at rbcm.ca/fossil-finds.
Oedoparena larva in a barnacle test. Photograph courtesy of Cara Gibson.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
Insects in the Marine Environment
Dr. Joel Gibson Curator of Entomology
Dr. Henry Choong Curator of Invertebrates
Insects are the most diverse group of animals, accounting for about 80 per cent of the world’s species. They seem to be everywhere, from inhospitable hot spring environments to the frozen tundra to our immediate surroundings—as you read this, it is likely that there is more than one insect sharing your space with you.
But despite their abundance and success in exploiting almost every ecological niche, insects are limited to approximately 30 per cent of the Earth’s environments: the terrestrial sphere. Oceans and seas account for the remaining 70 per cent, but they are largely devoid of insects. Given their tenacity, why is it that insects seem to have failed to colonize the marine environment?
As the museum’s curator of entomology (Joel) and invertebrates (Henry), we explore this question in our joint research on flies, beetles and barnacles on British Columbia’s shorelines. What we found was a vastly more complicated picture than the one we expected, and it has to do with the insects’ life cycles, their interactions with non-insect marine organisms, the ever-shifting nature of the shoreline environment and how scientists study marine insects.
Using natural history collection specimens, in-field observations and molecular analysis, we generated new locale records and natural history data for seven insect species found on Vancouver Island’s beaches and shores over several years (2017–19). All seven species are associated with barnacles along the Pacific coast of Canada, the United States or Japan. In particular, the larvae of Oedoparena (Diptera: Dryomyzidae), known as barnacle flies, prey upon barnacles, yet little is known about their life cycle relative to the barnacles. (continued on the next page)
(left) Joel Gibson and Henry Choong at the shoreline in Parksville, Vancouver Island. Photograph courtesy of Cara Gibson.
(right) Joel Gibson collecting insects using a pooter. Photograph courtesy of Cara Gibson.
To investigate the relationship between the insects and barnacles, we collected barnacle samples from various natural and artificial hard surfaces, such as rock outcrops, pilings, boat ramps and breakwater structures. Back at the Royal BC Museum, the collected barnacles were dissected and examined under a microscope for taxonomic identification and to determine the presence of insect larvae, pupae and pupal cases. Adult insects at the beach were also collected, using sweep nets and more specialized equipment such as an aspirator (or “pooter”).
It turns out that insects have not failed at all; rather, they are remarkably successful at exploiting novel niches in a harsh and often hostile environment. Insects breathe. One limiting factor to the success of insects in the marine environment is the ability to withstand periods of immersion. Barnacle flies manage to complete their larval and pupal stages by selecting barnacles that occur in locations optimal to the survival of the larvae and pupae during periods when the barnacles are submerged or exposed.
Our research also shows that there may be more insects that can be considered “marine” than previously thought. Most entomologists define marine insects as species that spend at least one of their developmental stages in an ocean habitat. Others consider insects to be secondarily marine if they must feed, either as larvae or adults, on other (non-insect) marine organisms. But our work has shown that even when taken together, these definitions still underestimate insect species that have specifically adapted to the marine shoreline ecosystems. Our observations of other species of flies and beetles found at shorelines, some of which prey on barnacle fly larvae, show that the definition of marine insects should be extended to include habitual predators of other intertidal insect species. We therefore propose that the definition of secondarily marine insects can be expanded to include those which do not necessarily feed directly on marine organisms, but whose life history is nevertheless intimately tied to marine organisms. This sort of research, being conducted at the museum every day, allows us to understand the diversity of life on British Columbia’s coasts and how future changes on those coasts could impact thousands of unique species.
We are publishing the results of our investigation in an upcoming issue of the journal Canadian Entomologist under the title “New Range Records and Life History Observations of Insects (Diptera: Dryomyzidae, Chironomidae; Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) Associated with Barnacles (Balanomorpha: Balanidae, Chthamalidae) on the Pacific Coast of North America and Japan.”
