 So this is going to be the second to last lecture in the entire course and since you guys are Probably anxiously awaiting the arrival of the dinosaurs. I figured I might as well Fast-forward us to some stuff with some teeth in it now as a bit of foreshadowing and tell you that these may not be The ferocious animals that you think we are going to talk about all right So without any further ado, let's start in a very unlikely place Let us start in Prince Edward Island and specifically let's go back in time not as far as we're going to go But back to 1845 so there was a farmer there He was digging a well and as he was digging the well out popped to this thing Which for a long time was one of the most famous fossils in Canada It still remains a very well-known fossil and it's a very odd thing as you can tell by the The teeth here will talk more about the dentistry of this particular This particular fragmentary skull, but the teeth are super important anyways This thing was identified as Bathenathis borealis so Bathenathis borealis is what this thing was called here It is getting some acclaim a $20 coin here I think that's a gold coin actually and that's where it stood until I think 2015 when Kirsten Brink who is a paleontologist who was a specialist in this group we're about to talk about and specifically the dentistry of them Examined it along with some colleagues and she determined that that in fact what had been called Bathenathis was in fact just an example of a genus that already existed which is called dimetrodon Which is probably an animal you've heard of before and so Bathenathis borealis Stop being Bathenathis borealis and in fact became dimetrodon borealis. So still super cool, right? That's where it's that's where that material would have gone That's what the whole beast would have looked like we know that because we have more complete records of Dimetrodon now all the biology people in the class may ask yourself will hold on a second Jason Which name had priority and that's where the story gets interesting Bathenathis was actually the originally named genus So really all of the dimetrodon should have become Bathenathis except as is the case Where it will seriously mess up every child's play set because that beast is something that dimetrodon that shows up a lot they break the rules the conventions of Zoological nomenclature which is a fancy way for saying the names the rules of naming animals and Despite the fact that Bathenathis the Canadian name should have taken over everything and everything all the dimetrodon should be on Bathenathis They kept dimetrodon and they rejected Bathenathis as a name Because everybody had been using this for so long that it would mess everything up. Anyways, that's the story of Bathenathis So that is Canada's second ever named vertebrate fossil and until we discovered dinosaurs out west Arguably the coolest fossil in Canada. It also tells a pretty cool story So there is dimetrodon this thing is a pretty ferocious beast if you look at it That is not something you would want to discover just recently. This is 2019 another PEI story They found trackways so the actual footprints of what is now dimetrodon Borealis Walking through PEI so more evidence of the Inhabitation of these ferocious looking animals in Princewood, Edward Island. So There are some Unexpectedly cool things coming from PEI not just potatoes now Here's another story and this is one that actually involves a Cape Breton connection So here's Dr. Sean Modesto who discovered or not discovered he described this critter here Which turned out to be an important example of an early group of reptiles And this is not from the last one was from the Permian. This is from the latest carboniferous So it's just at the very very end of this. So this is super duper cool I actually I invite you to look this up and Google it It's a really interesting story with a lot of politics a kid discovered this thing on the beach about 20 plus years ago And then the family held on to it because at the time you could own fossils and they held on to it until Eventually they could get money to sell it, which is why it only just got it only just got described now It should have been described back in the 80s of the 70s. Anyways That's a bit of an odd story, but you can look that up if you want later on so if you want to study the Permian in particular so you want to study, you know beasts like this the place to go is not actually PEI the place to Go is South Africa South Africa is the mecca for this kind of research and here is Dr. Sean Modesto. He's in South Africa with colleagues doing research there He goes periodically you can go up and knock on his door if he's around and get him to open his drawers And he's got some nice little fossils little skulls and things He's collected that he has with them for studying really neat stuff So I find this kind of a music is down here. It's his Cape Breton University professor Sean Modesto shown here where we work in South Africa hopes to visit PEI this summer to look for more fossils This is right after he published to this paper right now. So I actually went out with him the next summer He did get out there. He did look for more fossils and we found Nothing we spent about two very pleasant weeks walking along the beach looking for stuff and just hoping we would discover something But there was very little discover So the place you want to go if you want to study the Permian is really this place here But it is worth noting that you can find remarkable material in our own backyard for the Permian And as you'll see in a second more importantly the carboniferous So look at this beast right here. Look at that beast right there. That is from the Permian period And let's get some geologic context. So there is Dimetrodon borealis. This is the Permian period right here So roughly 300 million years ago to 250 million years ago Here is Dimetrodon and you can see him living with all of these guys There's some terrible Reconstructions from some kids set and if you got a you know dollar store package of dinosaurs I almost guarantee you're gonna get Dimetrodon in here and that makes paleontologists angry It also makes us happy because it's an awesome animal. It's awesome. That's the part that makes us happy The part that makes us angry. I'll talk about later on but I mean if you look at this thing That's a horrible reconstruction, but this is a pretty darn advanced beast So this is where we left off, right? This is where we left off This is a reconstruction of tiktalic right similar to like a canthastega these very simple fishapods getting up to very primitive amphibians or what we were seeing in the Devonian and the latest Devonian when we first to have this this land to The Sea-to-land transition or fin to limb transition as they terminology sometimes goes This is where we were in the Devonian and here again is our geologic time scale So we went through from the this is our in reverse order here or division Silurian Devonian We left off right here. This is where we get tiktalic in that This is where we've got this is where we've got over here is where we've got Dimetrodon so a lot has happened we've gone from this thing right and We end up with Dimetrodon right here So this interval right here the carboniferous and then going through the Permian a lot happens, right? We start off with the first animals that are vertebrates on land right here and then a lot of action happens So this is really what I'm going to concentrate on and then we're going to end off the lecture returning to the Permian So if you want to study the Permian, you've got some material in Prince Edward Island This map is not totally accurate if on the other hand you want to study the carboniferous Which is this interval in between the Devonian and the Permian? There is literally no place better in the entire world to study it than the Maritimes We have not only just a world-class record We have the best record in the entire world to study this and I'm going to show you a lot of local examples I'm really going to emphasize I'm going to encourage you to go to some of these places this summer to go check out some of this stuff So let's do a really quick recap We started in the Ordovician with some spore evidence of plants on land by the Silurian We've got our very first vascular plant showing up right that's in the Silurian by the early Devonian We've got these simple trees starting off not trees very simple short stuff by the end of the Devonian We've got large trees really weird bizarro trees the earliest seed producing organisms by the end of the Devonian Inside the forest. We've got these primitive. I'm going to use the term insects It's going to make the etymologists angry entomologists people who study earth repods like this So these are not technically insects, but they're insects in the way that you or I would talk about insects I'm just going to use that for all of these land-based earth repods like this So we've got these really primitive insects hanging out We've got things like this is an example a beautiful example from from new Brunswick. There is a Gorgeously preserved fossil millipedes. These are what I'm talking about relatively primitive earth repods Crawling around and that's going to create the impetus for organisms to come crawling out into land because now there is an Ecosystem on land that didn't used to exist there It was just beaches and deserts to come out to more or less a few little liverworts maybe but now There's actually an ecosystem to come out to you're going to crawl out into this rather than into just a desolate, you know Sandscape So that's where we've got up to and at the end of the Devonian We've got this weirdo elongate extinction event that probably extends over an interval of 50 million years over here And so we kill a bunch of stuff and that's where we ended off Okay, so now we are going to come up with some brand new stuff So as you guys who grew up in Cape Breton or people who have really kind of started looking at the culture here You know that Cape Breton is famous for its culture of coal So this is the interval in time when the vast majority of the world's coal is made and in fact It's literally in the name right so this is the carboniferous that we're talking about now this next interval We are going into the carboniferous and this carboniferous. This is literally referencing Is the carbon period the carbon referencing the carbon in all the coal. So this is literally the coal period So the carboniferous is the term that is sometimes used for this period Alternatively, you sometimes seem and I'm going to go back and forth you sometimes see the carboniferous Divided up into two sub periods or two actual periods here the missus ipian and the pennsylvania So this depends on kind of a british versus in an american way and it's not just like british versus american spelling The north american record of the carboniferous is amazing relative to the rest of the world And so we have the capacity here to really obviously divide it up into these two subsections And so british our american convention and north american canadian convention is usually to talk about the missus ipian and the pennsylvania The british and european convention is often just to talk about the upper and lower carboniferous, but they're equivalent things So the bottom line in talking about these two halves of the carboniferous is the first half was relatively wet And I don't mean rain. I mean a retention of the shallow oceans covering the continents that we saw up until this point in the In the paleozoic and then the pennsylvania represents a rapid increase towards Much much drier conditions the kinds of conditions you would recognize today is what the world ought to be like So let us look at a map of what we looked at in the pennsylvania what it would have looked like sorry in the missus ipian Here is the missus ipian And you can see you've still got large areas of and we're focusing on north america But I mean the other continents obviously exist So your large areas of the globe are still covered in these Ipyric seas which is a fancy word for a sea that covers a continent And of course within there you're going to have all sorts of sea creatures living now Notably remember we've lost all the reefs the reefs are gone the greatest reefs in the world or in the devonian We've lost them all So instead of actually i'll return to that in a second so in the pennsylvania We progressively dry the world out and into that dry world expands the floral realm So we get these broad swamps that start to move out into this into this Now, you know Increasingly dry world and as we you know rain comes off We've got that interface large deltaic sequences all along the edge of of this area This is true in large parts of the world So i'm going to come back to this stuff in a second But what I want to do right now is just talk about the production of all this dry land I how do we actually get here? This is a an image of the the late carboniferous So first remember that where we left off before we were talking about uh the The production of a kind of novus scotia and the coast of north america as a result of Uh plates colliding into the side. So this represents i'll just call it north america This is lorencia or lorussia or whatever you want to call it at this point But this is essentially ancient north america and each one of these remember represents a collision Where a continent slams into the side and so here is ganderia Right here. Here's avalonia and there's maguma. These are the three components that make up novus scotia And they slam into the side Sequentially and every time they do they throw up giant mountains in their wake And so you can see that during the ordo vision the silerian the devonian but kind of stopping by the mid to late devonian We've been building up massive amounts of mountains along the coast and we've built up now Essentially north america not north america. Essentially novus scotia So that is where we left off That is the part of the tectonic story we talked about and so here are the three components that make up Uh that make up um, uh, novus scotia This is a thing called the dashwood strain that came over earlier on and they go slamming along and these are I don't you don't need to know these terms, but these are the origin Sorry, orogenes. Remember this is the term we use from mountain buildings that tectonic all the way through the akkadian Which is this last kind of final event when maguma slams onto the side And you can actually still see the remnants of this remember this down here is the maguma terrain up kind of this bit Here is the avalon terrain and this bit here is ganderia and it continues off and you know this bit here corresponds to You know the avalon peninsula newfoundland, etc, etc So this line right here that separates maguma from the avalon terrain You can actually see this you can drive along. This is just outside of parsboro You can go to google maps and see it right now the highway they put on follow is pretty much perfectly this division You can see this, you know versus this these are two entirely different Microcontinent stitched together along this giant fault that cuts the entire province in half like this So I really invite you to drive along and check this stuff out You can drive through millions of years of earth history this summer as you go around All right, so this is where we are by the end of the devonian We've slammed all of this stuff into the side. We've built, you know, we've built uh, novus kosher cool So we left off there, but there is an elephant in the room something we have not talked about which is this thing So this giant continent over here, which is usually called gandwana This makes up, you know south america A lot of components so mostly south america and africa. This thing is still coming this direction So it's coming towards us. It hasn't collided it yet when it collides It's going to complete the production of this giant supercontinent of panjia So even though we've built up novus kosher here By the kind of middle to late devonian this thing is still coming on and the collision of this thing as you can see Here is proto gandwana coming along that collision takes place largely in the carboniferous With some kind of continued action into the the early Uh early permean kind of going along here, but we've got major Mountain building mostly in the southern part of the appellations is where you see the mountain building there going on Because this thing is coming in and it's coming in a bleak angle. So it's slamming in over here Now even though the actual the main action over here isn't going to take place, you know past the end of the devonian Even though uh, you're not getting direct continent slamming in here You still have impact because you're slamming so hard down into the southern part That that force translates through the whole continent and it puts pressure on all of the faults Which are built up in this thing up in this area here So we even know we don't really have active mountain building After the devonian throughout the carboniferous We still have action going on within the novus kosher realm within the maritime So there's still tectonic effects By extension of all this stuff, which is happening down south and I want to show you this is something that I think I showed you early in the semester if not, I showed you this in um 1105 I need you guys who took 1105 So if you look at a terrain map of novus kosher not novus kosher Sorry, nevada over here What you should see is a bunch of parallel mountains with Basins in between them. So these are going to be eroding away and there's going to be rivers and you know Alluvial fans and things building up sediment in these low-lying areas. Well, how did this happen? Well, remember the overall story is about subduction along the you know the coasts of south america and This part of north america this component right here though is not actively subducting. What's going on right here Is that we've got movement We've got movement Going this direction. This is the san andre's fault So even though this is a transform fault, if you remember from lab, so it's moving like this And even though this is a long ways away from any kind of active fault at all The stress that this movement has the shearing motion over here kind of pulls this part this direction here So it ends up behaving like a divergent boundary. It gets Extensional force which is translating from way over here. We think so this is just a reminder that you can still impact areas of the continents a long ways away from active active faults right active tectonic boundaries the other thing is that even though this is a transform boundary It's not it's not moving apart. It's not, you know, it's not subduction. It's not collisional It can still cause right the shearing effect here can still open up basins over here So we think that's what was going on in The maritimes during this interval and here is a analogy for that if you look at turkey. So what's going on in turkey? You've got the Arabian plate over here and we've got africa slamming into slamming into the this portion of Of asia and europe over here and the overall the overall Effect of this right is material moving like this But if you look at what's going on in here, this is a transform fault right here This whole region here is one of extension. So these guys are actually kind of moving apart All these brown areas are basins all these green lines here are fault So this whole thing has got a whole series of little faults where portions are dropping down Right, these are shearing left and right and they're making little basins along the edge there You've got volcanoes erupting at different points over here Right, you've got another strike slip fault going that way over here and little basins forming all over So the actual dynamics within right within turkey are super complicated with a lot of left right motion and a lot of basins Forming through extension and shearing even though the tectonic, right? Right the real main stress is this directional Compressional stuff right here It it shears and it rotates and it puts all sorts of weird stresses on turkey Which causes all of these complicated effects here So the same thing would have been happening to the entire maritime region throughout the carboniferous even though the action was taking place down in the southern kind of portion of the Of the east coast of north america There was still lots of pressure translating up to Up to the maritime's and that caused little basins to open up It caused lots of strike slip faulting etc So here is a map from a recent paper by actually a guy who was on my phd committee martin giblin Super nice guy. He was the lead author on this and this shows this whole region that we refer to as the maritime's basin You can see it it it stands all the ways over to newfoundland. It is uh, you know Nova scotia parts of new brunswick up to the gas bay peninsula up here all the things you've been talking about So this was undergoing, you know active sedimentation for about 120 million years Right and it made a package that's up to 12 kilometers thick in some areas of rock resulting from that So a huge amount of accommodation right of basins forming and getting filled in by material And you can see the older stuff. We talked about up in gas bay over here Well, you can see this stuff here the uh, the magasha material up here The material we're mostly going to be talking about is considerably younger. This is going to be carboniferous material So the overarching story and you do not have to memorize any of this But the overarching story is that we start off initially With marine deposits So we've got a series of basins right small mostly isolated basins forming as a result of this Translated stress from down south and it forms, you know a series of blocks of material which are dropping away You know, maybe something like this right It's a little basins and those basins are initially filled up by the ocean They fill up by the ocean, but over time those basins start to get more restricted So they get cut off from the ocean. They start evaporating We talked about this with the Mediterranean remember how we got cut off and it evaporated And as it evaporates it starts to lay down large thick layers of salt and large thick layers of uh, Of gypsum and anhydrite minerals we talked about when it was more open We had limestones being deposited So at some points the whole thing was covered in limestones other portions They you just had small restricted basins and certain portions of the maritime's That were just depositing things like salt and gypsum Then over time the whole area gets mostly cut off from the ocean And instead it gets replaced by a kind of a river system with some coastal deposits periodically the Marine area kind of transgresses That's the fancy term we use for when the sea level rises and covers things But for most of the carboniferous the or the second half of the carboniferous What's going on is that all of the maritime's Is uh defined by kind of river and lake systems right river and lake mostly terrestrial systems This is just showing all the different groups now they interact together Now one more thing I want to quickly mention is that if you build up something like Salt or gypsum and you put a bunch of weight on top of it So if you get a flat layer of salt like this And then you put a bunch of weight on top of it the salt starts behaving like a liquid And it actually starts rising up like this like a lava lab and it will force itself through All the surrounding areas. That's what they're showing right here. So we call these things die appears So these would have originally been a salt deposit down here somewhere and they're rising up forcing themselves through younger rocks But as they rise up right this portion is kind of draining off and going here Which means that this portion is going to settle down into the area that the salt migrated out of at the same time Is this was putting pressure up here? So this migration of salt Actually can create basins. It can create depressions Because all the surrounding area where the salt used to be disappears And so the overlying rock falls down And so that's actually going to be an active thing that's going on as well All of that action down south is putting pressure on the salt systems. We've got a Nova Scotia New Brunswick and PI etc And it kind of squishes that salt up and as a result of the salt getting squished up towards the surface Other components where the salt used to be fall down and allow Uh allow material to be deposited a final thing We're talking about is that all of this crazy tectonic activity that was taking place in the Devonian or division Silurian those rocks are relatively hot Once that tectonic activity settles down those rocks start to cool down and as they cool down they get denser Remember we talked about this and as they get denser they actually start sinking on a regional level Which means that everything starts slowly sinking So the activity is really complicated in terms of trying to figure out what's going on over here But the overarching story is that in the mississippi and we get this stuff here deposited which is mostly Limestones carbonates and salts and then over time we start to deposit on top of it this stuff here Which is mostly river and kind of coastal deposit stuff All right, that is where I want to move on. I'm not going to talk I'm going to give you some examples here if you want to read in more detail. This is really jargony But this is a overview of pretty much everything. I just told you I'm going to tell you right now So here are some examples You can go visit this summer if you guys go and swim up in the gypsum quarry Remember, this is an old gypsum mine frozen at this point here. You can see gypsum exposed This is this material though is being deposited in the In the mississippian and then if you go down to point of cony. This is just past lukacek You can the chicken joint if you're not familiar You can go see this. This is a beautiful expanse of coal right there with Overlying is a very thin marine deposit on top of that but mostly this is river systems You can actually see the old river channels Literally the kinds of things you guys were doing in the virtual lab. You can see right here And so this is kind of classic mississippian that early Carboniferous and this is classic later carboniferous if you drive along Towards the gaelic college coming down the other side of kelly's mountain take a look across the water And you'll see this line of white right there and I actually recommend you drive over park here and just walk along You check it out. That's gypsum. This is actually pretty widespread Little bits and pieces that underlies a lot of the material we're seeing All right It underlies a lot of the stuff you actually see Because most of what we're exposing at the surface in Cape Breton is this material here But this stuff is exposed at the surface in certain components as well certain spots as well If you look on google maps you've been up to towards the dingwall area all of this white stuff here This is all old mine area. And if you go there, it's this blistering white Surreal landscape. It looks like a science fiction place. This is now owned by a It's owned by a cross country ski clubs is cross country ski trails and atv Scales and things all through here But you can just drive this direction if you're going along the cabot trail park at the ski club and walk out And go check this out. It's really neat. I recommend you do it Now here's one final thing I want to tell you because it's super cool. I just learned this this year Believe it or not. I've been here a while I probably learned it before but I just Re-remembered anyways this year is that if you go down here says mabu right here This is mabu if you just go past mabu these spots you can see it too But this is a really easy to get to spot if you go just down past mabu towards finley point So you're just going to go past mabu and keep driving down this road over here You can actually go and touch one of those weird columns of salt I was telling you about these die appears right so one of these Things up here one of these guys. I was telling you about here where it's migrating up You can actually see it bursting through onto the surface So what it's going to look like when you get there is like this and to put you into scale you would be I don't know a tiny little person this would be like you're not that big I just can't draw a smaller person but this is really big and this represents That is gypsum right so that's gypsum migrating up And if you look along the edge you can see the rocks are kind of bent up and cracked along the edge Is this thing migrates up so that's what it is going to look like there Um You can see it going along and this is just the if you were to drill down This goes way underground this thick layer riding up the surface I mean, this is one of these things that's straight out of a textbook I mean this could quite literally be in a textbook And you can just go and see it this summer in your own backyard the it's really hard for me to over emphasize how amazing the carboniferous geology of Nova Scotia and the maritimes are Anyways by the time you get into the pennsylvania the second half This is overall what the story is like and you can see here's here's Nova Scotia underneath here and New Brunswick And pi is kind of underneath here So we've got a series of kind of mountains surrounding us You know mountains all over the place and when you think about the class we had we were talking about The river systems that are going to be associated with this and these would be rivers all coming down And they are moving towards the coast over here all these river systems So overall this is a story of kind of rivers and lakes and periodically The ocean the ocean emerges up onto land you get these periodic floods inland But generally speaking what's going to be going on is that this stuff here is going to be mostly terrestrial deposits through the pennsylvania That is the overarching story So the story that I just told you you can actually find the same story all over go through pennsylvania I know a lot of you have heard me talk about Ireland a lot because I was there The summer before last you can find the pennsylvania and mississippian in ireland But the mississippian is far better represented here where the land of the pennsylvania if you go to Ireland which used to be attached to all of north america remember it was in the middle along with us He just got ripped and carried away when panjee broke up You can see these broad-scale deposits. These are all that's a coral right there. I'd see these are photographs I this is google maps as a photograph I took All right, so this is just this whole area is covered in limestone exposed like that. This is another shot You can go hiking over it. It's really a surreal landscape So just to give you an idea of how widespread this stuff used to be So that is the mississippian. We're still covered up. There's the devonian. Here's the mississippian You're still covered up in large portions of the world More of the same except we killed all the reefs and instead we've replaced them with these fields of things like this Like crinoids like this and you can find Blastoids, I don't care that you know what these things are. That's a crinoid. You should know what that is It's essentially a starfish on a stock and when they die You should be able to see that looks like a cheerio right here When they die their stocks are just made up of a series of it's almost like a stack of tires If you remember a stack of tires in a tire store except they're made of uh, calcium curve They made of the same stuff that a clam shell is made of a little stack of them And it's held together by fleshy material So when they die all those little cheerio bits of shells just fall apart Anyways, this is a limestone made pretty much entirely of that and that's a limestone pretty made pretty much entirely of these tiny little skeletal fragments So if you look at the trees here for scale, this should give you an idea of how abundant Right these marine communities were so in this case This is one particular formation in southern illinois. You do not have to memorize these numbers This one particular formation has been estimated to be made up of 280 million Billion million billion Individuals broken down. I mean this gives you an idea of again how prolific these these seas were All right, so we mostly lose them as we move into the pennsylvania I mean, there's still lots of stuff living in the waters, but the pennsylvania is more Defined by this expansion of dry land and that's a combination of the fact that we're slamming things in and building up All this dry land. It's also because what you can't see is down south here. We still have Uh, we still have gondwana in south america and south africa or africa They're sitting down in the south pole and for most of the carboniferous And the permean and actually the late devonian they've got a big ice cap sitting on top of them Just like antarctica does today And so as that ice cap builds up just like our ice caps today That is water which used to be in the ocean But it gets locked up in ice on land and so that's another component that's going on here Now that ice cap is we're going to talk about later on is going to change size over time But we've got an ice pack a cap for most of the carboniferous in particular late carboniferous And so that's another component of what's going on with this drying of land All right, so what is living on that new land? Well, I told you that as we we've got all this green here What they're trying to show you there is an expansion of forests So forests are expanding all over the place and the forests are starting to look more like a forest You would you would recognize but they're still super weird now They are big and that you could get lost in here. So we've got things, you know, 30 meter tall trees But the trees are still mostly really weird things things like horsetails club mosses tree ferns These things are dead. These things are still alive, but these things are tiny plants today But back in the carboniferous they were towering giants So these I actually do want you to know these terms because these if you know these these plants And you can recognize them you can recognize most of the main groups of the fossils You're going to find any beach you walk along in Cape Breton not any of them But a lot of beaches you walk along in Cape Breton So the first one here is this thing here called single area and this is a giant club moss And they're very tiny organisms today So they often call this thing the tire track tree because the bark of this tree had these characteristic patterns of raised and And raised areas and then indentations that look like someone drove along with a car They look like tire tracks This thing over here is a giant horsetail All right, so you found these today probably they're these little pipe-like organisms that you can Plants you can pull apart they're hollow All right They're very small and they occur in in swamp state. They might be a foot tall But back in the carboniferous they got massive. Here's a shot of a beautiful fossil I discovered This is my nephew. He came to visit last summer. This is joggins the locality We're going to talk about later on this is just lying out there in joggins Again, give you an idea of the quality and you can see the individual segments here that made this thing up And you can't really see it here, but they have these vertical lines on like that If you find a component of something of these segments, you're looking at calamities. That's calamities a giant horsetail So this thing here is lapida dendron It's sometimes called the pineapple tree or a scale tree because the bark of it looks like it's covered in scales like this It looks kind of like the outside of a pineapple Now down here you see these large roots coming off of it right these weird kind of root systems Right these things are called stigmaria. They get their own name and you're going to find these quite often These are actually very common fossil because they're already buried in the ground before they died because the roots were obviously in the ground So here is a shot of stigmaria. This is a another shot from joggins I took so this is the main root system and then you can see that each one of these nodes here Would have had a little root coming off of it and you can actually see the roots being preserved coming off of this This is a gorgeous fossil. I don't have a scale here, but this is probably a foot long something like that Here are some more complicated or more advanced organisms. This is a seed fern So these things are dead remember Neuropteris And it looks like a fern if you see a branch of it, but they form these giant kind of trees over here This is a cortades. This is an early gymnosperm. That's the group that includes conifers later on So if you think about a pine tree, that's a conifer as well as things like ginkgos and psychads So these are things that are still alive today. Obviously conifers are still alive This particular thing is not anymore, but it is an early representation of the group that is Going to dominate the mesozoic and it's still a major group of animals or animals or plants today All the rest of this stuff is dead or is tiny sized So here are some examples of some modern, you know, modern still primitive But some modern representations of this group here of gymnosperms All right, so if you want to see these plants you can actually see them places like point of coni You can see them up towards glace bay port morian all along there You can see gorgeous examples of these things If you just go along the beach, but if you want to see really world-class things go to the caperet and fossil center It's in sydney mines. It's probably like five bucks to get into or something It is essentially a volunteer run facility and it's amazing They collected all this material back when the when the mines were all running and they had access to fresh material from the mines So it's gorgeous. It's absolutely gorgeous. I recommend you go there if you have family visiting take them as well It really is something to see So here in addition to all of these cool plants forming We're building up these thick layers of coal and the coal is literally just made up of the thick peat Right all the the organic matter which is being shed off of you think about a swamp today You want the trees coming out of the swamp? So if these are my trees right here? Here's my trees the tree these trees as they shed foliage They're going to be shedding layers of material down like this and in swampy environments They can build up thick layers probably really slowly like less than a millimeter a year But over time you can build up enough organic material That if you preserve that take it into the rock record and cook it you can transform it into coal Which is the lifeblood or was the lifeblood of the economy in Cape Breton this was essentially the the energy powerhouse of of Canada during the kind of second world war and interval before So you can see this stuff again all over we've got a point of Coney This is a chimney corner beach, which is a beautiful beach kind of halfway between Halfway between Ingenish or Inverness and Shedacamp absolutely gorgeous And if you want to go again and see some museums go to the Cape Breton miners museum in Glace Bay It's right here in Glace Bay. You can actually go underground in a coal mine on a tour with actual Coal miners. It's absolutely great if you have not done this do this or if you do it as a kid Or even did it before you took a geology course go do it now You'll have a very different understanding you know going back and down and touching You know a swamp 350 million years old All right, so this is where we were in the pennsylvania and we're sitting here in the middle You know you've got we're on the edge of the you know sea here We're not actually in marine but right on the edge And we've got these swamps all being built up around mountains surrounding us swamps all on the edge You know more drier area upland As that ice sheet over here Expands and contracts. So if this is my ice sheet if the ice sheet builds up and expands here That means some of this water Is not going it it evaporated out But it's not coming back in in the form of rain or snow It's getting trapped here, which means the sea level is going to it's going to decrease It's going to go out on the other hand when this thing contracts when it warms up the sea level is going to rise And so this goes back and forth back and forth back and forth and through the through the pennsylvania You can really see this beautifully And so what's powering those little back and forth are malankovich cycles Remember we talked about the orbital cycles malankovich cycles earlier on That's what's powering these things back and forth And at this point in novus kosher or rather the maritime's history The tectonic activity was pretty quiet during a lot of it And so the entire region was just slowly sinking right through thermal subsidence It means it was cooling down and the whole thing tectonically the whole the whole plate was slowly sinking down as it got denser and heavier Which meant that these contractions back and forth back and forth Became really obvious because you're not jumping everything up and down to radically changing where the continents were They were just slowly dropping down enough that you could build up layers of sediment And so you were able to preserve really well this signal of up and down going on with the With the sea level itself beautifully preserved in well in particular in uh, sydney, but also along stullerton, you know along Along inverness, etc all over so here is this term. This is a fancy term It's kind of an archaic term now But a cyclothem is a term that came out of coal geology down in the southern states to refer to the fact that we often saw these alternating packages where you know, you'd see going from You see going from kind of terrestrial drier materials to getting swampier and swampier and swampier And then eventually coal and then sitting on top of the coal was often a shallow marine band Where it actually represented the sea rising enough enough that it it covered up Right and killed all the forest and then it would flip back to being dry land again, and then it would get slowly wetter and wetter and wetter and then eventually you'd build up coal and then the ocean would cover everything and uh And you'd get another little thin marine band So you see the same things in Nova Scotia and that oscillation is actually super important Because not only did it preserve right these not only did it create the environments In sequence where you had these nice nice shallow water coastal tropical environments to build up the thick deposits of peat But also the fact that every once in a while the sea level would rise up and cover this Right cover this with a layer of rock on top of marine rock meant that all of this carbon got trapped in the rock record instead of just getting broken down by bacteria So all of that abundant all of that abundant plant matter Produced all of this economic, you know these economic deposits of coal for us But what are they also doing? They're also producing oxygen and with the oxygen We saw the production of something which is going to freak some of you out So you can watch this between your fingers or you can watch it in your choice quick little video So this is what the carboniferous was like in terms of an atmospheric level We had probably something like 35 percent oxygen which is about 50 percent more oxygen than we have Which allowed these giant insects to exist because insects breathe through their skin and the bigger you get the more volume you have the more Oxygen you need and so there's a maximum size of what you can be at 21 percent oxygen When you had 35 percent oxygen things could get a lot bigger So you had giant insects going on you may also have had super forest fires going through Some people think this may have actually played a role in preserving coal But you can imagine how forest fires are going to burn if you've got you know Twice as much oxygen going through or 50 percent more oxygen So in addition to insects being giant and some of them really were this thing was almost a meter across some of these guys We also just had the advent of flying insects So by the beginning of the carboniferous those insects had diversified from simple things like springtails towards Flying things like dragonflies or things that couldn't fold their wings up And then finally cockroach like things you could actually fold their wings up Think about a cockroach or a ladybug today by the end of the carboniferous So we're getting more and more and more of the animal groups you're used to Except they're really big. This is mega nura. This is a classic carboniferous thing along with earth or pleura Which you saw in the video this thing was almost a meter across It wasn't actually a dragonfly but a dragonfly like organism So in addition to giant forests and giant insects in these forests, what else do we have? So I asked you before, you know, what was in those forests? And then the answer was Amphibians in the last lecture well in this case I'm going to ask what was in those forests and I literally mean What was in those forests quite literally you look at that stump right there that dead stump So if you're a little animal, you're a little lizard for example, and you want to hide somewhere Where would be a great place to hide? Well, how about you live inside this hollow stump here? And in fact a lot of organisms did The result was that they died within these stumps sometimes were buried within the stumps and preserved within the stumps And that takes us to a super cool story So before I get to that Cooper cool story I want to ask you a question and this is not a rhetorical question And it is this it is how is a fern like an amphibian How is a fern like a newt and the answer is that both ferns And amphibians need water for reproduction remember we talked about this weird reproductive strategy of the spore producing things things like things like Like ferns today and the advent of the seed allowing these plants allowing plants to move out of what used to just be wet areas And start to colonize dry areas well moving into the carboniferous We're in the same situation where we've got these amphibians crawling around But those amphibians are still stuck near the water because if you've ever seen frog eggs or you've ever What frog eggs and the most common thing you're going to see you know They have to lay them in water which means they're stuck close to the water Which means most of the world is still off limits to the tetrapod So that changes as we move into the carboniferous with the advent of the amniotic egg What's an amniotic egg? It's just a chicken egg, right? It's an egg that has a hard outer shell so a chicken egg's an example of this Or if you've ever seen a reptile egg a snake egg or a crocodile egg You know that it's a thinner kind of a leathery shell on the outside But in both cases just like a seed this acts as a Membrane around it which essentially brings the water with it So this acts as a semi permeable membrane that keeps this thing From drying out and that means that if you're a lizard now you can lay this egg in the middle of a desert And it's just fine. So suddenly with the advent of the amniotic egg Reptiles are able to move out and colonize the entire world or are quickly able to and it turns out that that story Is told better than anywhere else in the world in north america. I want to remind you before going on that We are in fact egg laying organisms and you're going to say no, we aren't jason Well mammals specifically are not or rather our particular group of mammals the placental mammals are not But this is a mammal right here. This is a platypus and platypus is of course lay eggs and in fact Most mammals most primitive mammals laid eggs all primitive mammals laid eggs, right? But there still are mammals that lay eggs today things like echidnas and platypuses primitive mammals that are still alive today in uh in australia All right, so here we are in the carboniferous We've got this you know collision this oblique equation. I mean it's coming in at an angle Creating all this tectonic stress up here creating basins in that that allow material to be deposited in that's happening over there This is a map of the maritime basin as it's being formed So I want to show you three particular deposits that occurred within the maritime basin And this is where we're going to end off essentially this lecture We're going to we're going to try to get to this component right here So we're going to look at these guys here in orders starting off in order I mean in temporal order starting off with blue beach So this is what blue beach looks like and blue beach if you look at it is not a particularly compelling play Well, to a geologist is pretty neat. You got a nice bedding here. You can see a little bit of deformation Right, uh, but it's not super compelling now here is a shot of two people standing in front of it And you remember from last class we talked to professor jenny clack one of the most famous, uh Very repelientologists looking at the early origin of tetrapods just died unfortunately last week There is jenny clack standing in front of those rocks in blue beach Which is just outside of uh, just outside of wolfville if you know the area katia university This over here is a guy named chris manskey and chris manskey has a story very different than jenny clacks But uh, almost as interesting or maybe even more interesting to to some people So why this is interesting is because of material like this. This is all disarticulated material The preservation in this location is terrible And it was a high energy environment Which means that we don't get these kind of beautiful fossils like I showed you in pi Instead we just get fragments of bones right individual bones But there's still enough information in those bones to be able to tell what groups these things came from We've yet to find complete articulated specimens But we found individual bones of a lot of different things now more importantly What is the time interval these things are coming from? So here you go 350 million year old fossil mystery So this is uh, this is chris him and his wife sonia wood run this fossil center It's not government funded. It's literally just out of their house. All right. He has spent 25 years collecting Uh collecting rocks and the rocks he's collected from this area on blue beach are important Because they fill in a thing that we call rumor's gap rumors gap right here What is this? Well, this is largely an illusion But it was named after this american paleontologist who noted that we've got this early devonian stuff here where we get the First amphibian showing up and then we've got reasonably advanced reptiles showing up right here And we've got this gap right here that seems to have Nothing in it and it was a question of what is going on here And it was suggested that this was maybe an environmental thing. Maybe oxygen levels were too low for for many Many large animals to live now. It's looking like it's probably not a real thing at all This is probably just a preservational thing. It's probably just that we have not found many rocks of the right age And part of this story is coming now out of blue beach in novus kosher Because even though the material here is not very good There's enough different things showing up that we know that there is an abundance of organisms right of tetrapods Which we're living in this interval right here early on So the blue beach material is falling right in here in this early interval where there's almost no other spots Literally in the entire world. There's one or two other spots in the entire world where you can actually study This tetrapod material from this age range Now this is a paper if you want to read that 2015 paper that looked at that material. By the way, there's chris manskey. Very chris manskey is not a professional paleontologist He just does this entirely as a He's done this as a lifelong. I mean hobby is not the right term This is a this is a full-time thing for him But he just made that whole museum happen on his own without government money or anything else There's jennifer clack over here as well. Now we're going to talk in a second about joggins joggins is way up here We're looking around about 350 here Joggins is around kind of 350 and 310 million years and it's also really important. We'll come back to that in a second So you can look at the blue beach museum. You can go check it out. Here's his website It's a bit 1995 the website, but it's got lots of really interesting stuff talking about the discoveries there I'm going to show you a quick video now just about chris because chris really does deserve a shout out You should go check this out if you're ever in the Windsor area Or the wolfville area. It's outside of wolfville and consider clicking this button and throwing a few bucks their way Again, they don't get government funding. It's entirely a privately run facility and not privately in a for-profit way private in a He's put so much of his time and energy into making something happen that the government is not supporting at this point Well, when you think of famous fossil sites in Nova Scotia joggins quickly comes to mind But there's a five kilometer stretch in your minus basin That's drawn the attention of some of the world's leading paleontologists blue beach offers a treasure trove from earth's history 350 million years ago and the man who's been collecting along his shoreline for almost a quarter century now has a fossil named after him Some bones These are 350 million year old Parts of fishes two busloads of elementary school students hang on chris manskey's every word and they should No one knows the treasures of blue beach quite like him manskey's been collecting here for 24 years Oh, it was a fish And I didn't find it. It was my my colleagues found a little fish here a paleontologist from the university of calgary discovered a skull casing from a 350 million year old fish here in 2015 And unveiled it last month as avon nick this manskey eye It was top secret until the day it was published So it was just as much of a surprise that they'd even found it Much less name it paleontologists from universities like calgary harvard and cambridge continue to study fossils that manskey is found here Including rare tetrapods an animal that evolved into amphibians and was among the first to conquer land chris, where did your passion for paleontology come from? Did you already have it before you visited blue beach or did you discover it here? Oh, I had some of it, but I grew it here. It's a lot of work for two people though, right? Yeah, it's 100 000 pounds of rocks and it's a it's a big responsibility That's how much weight in fossils manskey and his wife sonia wood have stored in their own fossil museum at blue beach By the way, he's not the first in the family immortalized with a fossil Wood had a horseshoe crab named for her eight years ago. Yeah, well, we kind of feel like a couple of old living fossils, you know But um, yeah, we're both honored and um Not just for ourselves, but for our province. Oh, yeah, here's the find of the day This young gentleman has found a part of a jawbone. What's the teeth in the mouth of these fishes? This is really well preserved and i'm gonna get your name and record you as the finder Well, it's really fun going around and find all these fossils Though bram st. Peters isn't converted to paleontology quite yet No, I want to be an astronaut But class trips and visitors are always welcome here at the edge of the minus basin Many hands make light work at blue beach and if we're going to find that tetrapod, which we know is here Uh, it may just take a visitor's help to do so in the meantime chris manskey will keep looking There's literally nowhere else on earth where you can study fossils from that time period 350 million years ago There's two other places where you can study like 330 million years ago But there's the link and and and our evolution is right there on that beach And you call you called it a treasure trove and it really is because he's been doing it for decades And there's still something new to find every day. I've been there several times when you look down I mean there's there's fossils everywhere By the way manskey and would say a permanent facility is needed to store the fossils from blue beach He says right now if a paleontologist calls him up and wants a specific fossil It might take up to two weeks to dig it out depending on where in they're building it's stored I mean it literally is just the two a hundred thousand pounds. He said yeah amazing Okay, that is cool blue beach if you want to go and take a beautiful stroll Now continuing on talking about people in the maritimes. I want to talk to you about two of my favorite paleontological people working in the maritimes. This is matt stimson and his partner olivia king They are both graduate students. They're both working on uh They're both working on grad degrees right now. They have been publishing together Publishing together for like a decade And they are fantastic human beings. They're also amazingly productive They've worked out of the new brunswick museum for the last year or so and they've found so many cool things they've been concentrating a lot on new brunswick but You may well if you're walking along point of cony or jog and see matt or see his partner olivia Stop and chat with them. They're super friendly and they know so much about this material So here is an example. This is from december. This is a october. This is a new discovery of theirs This is from norton, which is just kind of outside of sussex new brunswick. If you know where that is This is another tetrapod locality no skeletal material, but trackways here, right? Which also falls in that early mississippian Gap interval so this puts it in as maybe the third site in the entire world that has that locality And it just adds more importance in terms of the carboniferous information that you can find In uh, you can find in the maritimes matt's also found at joggins It's the next spot. I'm gonna tell you about he found what he is still the earliest or the smallest example of a tetrapod trackway I mean a lot of really really neat stuff Okay, so let us now talk about joggins So joggins. I think I've mentioned already. It's a unesco world heritage site. It got status. I think in 2007 maybe 2008 so unesco is Is the organization the un as cultural organization and just like megashua, this represents a global recognition of Of importance that it you know is of international significance. So why is this locality so important? Well, the first thing is that it's really big, right? So you've got 4,000 meters and you get 4,000 meters of strata here Uh, so you can just walk along here and you can walk along four kilometers of exposed Strata because the strata has been whipped up on its side. See it's sitting about a 45 degree angle That means you can walk through time, right? You can walk through several million years as you walk along like this So here's charles lial and we talked about lial granddaddy of uniformitarianism We go on the founder of uh, you know founder of geology and here he is talking about he went Here twice actually in the 1800s and he says this is what he says at the time We've just returned from an expedition whether I went to see a forest of fossil coal trees the most wonderful phenomenon Perhaps I've ever seen so think about this. This is the grandfather of geology who's traveled all around the world And he says joggins is perhaps the most wonderful phenomenon geologically that he has ever seen I mean that's pretty high praise. It remains just as amazing So what is so cool about joggins is this you can find trees still in their upright positions It's a little bit controversial how this came to be, right? Probably they died maybe in a forest fire and then floods Came after and covered them up. We don't actually know exactly how long they stayed in that position for But the result is that we've got this is an old kind of 1800s era print showing somebody, you know taking these things out But you can find these things these things are important enough The world interior museum is building this new world-class display. They're spending millions and millions of dollars on it Nova Scotia just sent them out one of these it's going to be a high point within the new museum display in Toronto If you go out there, these things are famous the world over it really is a spot you got to go see So we've built a new interpretive center there. Lyall went there too. He was trying to figure out how coal Formed at the time people did not know what the origin of coal was and so you could see it here Interacting bands of coal you could see it in place with you know The trees itself and you could put together that it was formed out of peat out of material that was formed in these swamps originally But that's not what's really neat. So there's a bunch of cool stuff in joggins. There were things like The world's earliest land snail is from there which actually played a role in early debates of evolution Darwin references the The preservation of the environments and the fact that the environments oscillate back and forth In terms of his argument about the incompleteness of the fossil record. I mean this this locality It makes guest appearance of the origin of species. It's all over the place But what makes it super cool and what makes it being of continued importance is this So charles lyell and this guy william doson. We've seen william doson already. He was involved in the In the um in the uh, bathenathis, uh, discovery. He was involved in the Prototaxides, we've seen him a bunch. This is the guy who started the red path museum He's a novus ghostion originally Ended up at mcgill. He's the kind of founder of canadian geology right here. He is a he's out with charles lyell Is that they're showing you here? So they discovered in a fallen tree the remains of an early An early amphibian. So this guy here represents the earliest The earliest vertebrate fossil described in canada and it was lying within the tree imagine this is right here It's they found it laying within here in its death position So it would have been living inside this stump when this stump was hollow And then it would have died there and then when the stump got filled with sediment later on it got preserved perfectly in its position So this is pretty neat, right? This is an early amphibian, but it's not why joggins is so famous It's historically kind of neat This thing over here is why joggins is so famous and you're gonna look at that and go jason That looks like a bunch of garbage and it does this bunch of garbage right here is believe it or not novus ghost Is provincial fossil. This is a little thing called hyalonomous and why is named after lyell? You can see here, right? So why is hyalonomous so important? Well, if you look at the design of this thing right here, here's a reconstruction You should see that looks like something that would live in a desert, right? This looks like a proper lizard It looks like a proper reptile. This does not look like a salamander This does not look like the kinds of things that we're crawling around in the devonian and in fact That's exactly what it is. This represents at this point This represents. I'm going to show you a tree. This is kind of a tree of life right here So this whole group here, we are all the things that lay eggs that have shells and remember Mammals included in that group, right? We've evolved not to lay eggs anymore But the basal mammals still lay eggs, right? Platypus is still due so this whole group These are the amniotes. That's an amniotic egg. Remember that's an egg with a shell on it So this is a these are the amniotes and the amniotes have two broad divisions They have two big pathways the first pathway the first pathway comes over here And it leads to the dinosaurs and the lizards and the other pathway comes up here and it leads to us leads to the mammals So where does Hylonomus fit in this? Well hylonomus and hylonomus is not only the earliest still to this day still to this day The earliest known example of an amniote, right? It is also the earliest clear example of this Lineage right here. These guys here. We call the diapsids this lineage over here Now this other branch over here are the synapses. That's our branch, remember So where do we go in the world to find the earliest example of the synapses? If this is the earliest example, we know of the diapsids. Well, guess what? You go to joggins to find it believe it or not joggins has Still to this day the earliest known example of both of the two big branches of the vertebrates You know the terrestrial vertebrate family tree of the amniote family tree Both of them are represented at joggins. That is remarkable in addition to these upright trees You know, it's the it's the most consistent the best preserved example Of a carboniferous forest ecosystem in the entire world and we still continued to find stuff there It's absolutely a remarkable location So I really want to recommend that you guys travel there this summer and when you do it You can name drop you can go and you can talk to dr. Melissa gray. He was a really good friend of mine I went to I went to school with her at UBC. This is the facility they built. It's a really beautiful facility This is in joggins, which is there is not much to joggins There's like one restaurant over here, but really do make a point once the travel restrictions Ease up to go visit the effect visit all these places because honestly, we're going to be hurting the tourist economy Is going to be hurting in Nova Scotia this year So stay local do some staycations and go and do some Some spots that are good for your brain as well. So go try to track down. Melissa gray dr. Melissa gray She is a fantastic person as well. All right. I'm going to talk about one more person Also another one of my favorites people in the local paleo scene Everyone honestly all the paleontologists who work in Nova Scotia are super nice people So this is Hilary Madden. Hilary Madden is in in Ottawa. She's at Carleton in Ottawa And she's published a lot of really neat high profile stuff Most recently you can see this just came out 2019 December 2019 This thing here and this is from a locality Right, uh, that is not jogging. She's done a lot of work on joggings But the cool thing here is they found One lizard and then sitting on top of the other lizard is a tiny lizard of the same species And so they have interpreted that to be an example of parental care because these things were clearly living together And so that makes this the earliest example of a mother taking care of its offspring in the entire fossil record This is another Nova Scotian discovery, but here's the cool thing. Guess where this is It's right here in point of cony. It's literally just down the road from us And it's the same thing. This was discovered in a fossil tree And so if you are walking out along the beach anywhere and you're in a locality where you find a fossil tree stump Stop and look at it and take a look for anything that looks like bone Now if you see anything there, it's illegal in Nova Scotia to collect fossils or to tamper with fossils in any way But you can take your phone out and take a photograph and send it to me or send it off to Hillary Madden and you could you just may find, you know, the newest nature paper You might find one of these groundbreaking discoveries So before I move on from Hillary Madden, I'm just going to point out one of the coolest things about being in academia Is that you get to ask people who are way smarter than you? smart stuff So I was uh in preparing this the vertebrate guys they changed their minds about these these these phylogenies all the time And as a non vertebrate paleontologist I'm always going a little bit out of a lind to describe what's going on here And so especially where they're kind of sketchy and you're at the base of the tree Every time a new discovery comes it shuffles around everyone's position So I wanted to check and see what was going on And so I just sent out a message last night to Hillary and I said hey, Hillary what's going on and she said And I quote So yeah, okay. I long as to steal the earliest amniote and reptile There was something from overseas that threatened to usurp it But I don't think it ever took and here is our earliest synapse it and she says actually it's super dubious But here's the cool thing is she says she's got a brand new paper. This is not published This is uh brand new information just you guys know about they've got a brand new paper Which is in press right now which is going to knock this guy Out of being the oldest synapse it but the cool thing is the new oldest synapse it will also be from jogging So novus gosha still gets to keep that crown even as the science continues on so that's a really neat A really neat story. So there are three localities that showcase how amazing the geology in novus gosha is Okay, so from this point I want to uh Shake the world up once again. So at this point, what have we done? Well, we have built up things that are scampering around right laying heart eggs They look like proper lizards. So you know that we are well on the way to make Make guess what so the story from here and this is where I am going to Start next lecture is that we're going to build up an advanced group of animals Then we're going to kill in a mass extinction and then their position is going to flip And we're going to see an alternation and you already know this story between The mammal lineage and the lineage that makes up lizards and snakes And dinosaurs although as foreshadowing it might not be the flip you're expecting and that will be next class Which is going to be our final class. We're going to round up the big history And we're going to jump through about 200 million years in uh evolution. So it's going to be a whirlwind