All right. Last talk.
So, have you ever dreamed of going to a place that very few people have visited before?
A dentist might say, “Are you talking about my patient’s mouth? Just opened up a little bigger, you know.”
Come on. There’s nothing else funny in the rest of this talk. I was going back and forth between, you know, dentistry or endoscope, and I thought the endoscope was a little bit edgy but, you know, that might have woken you up.
In any case, in all seriousness, so this is what field scientists get to do sometimes. Right.
So, this place is up in the Northwest Territories. And I want you to picture yourself up there.
Right, so you are about 150 km away from the nearest human settlement.
And, you live in the tent and spend every day splitting rocks looking for fossil fish.
And this river, Anderson River, is about 700 km long.
If you paddle from this point all the way upstream to the origin, or all the way downstream to the Arctic Ocean, you will not see a single human house.
Nobody lives by this river around the present time.
And, you know, one day, we come back to the camp, have a supper, and then a thunderstorm rolls in, and, we sort of, you know, weathered out in the tent for about an hour, and we crawled outside the tent after the thunderstorm had passed.
And then we see this beautiful rainbow arching over the Anderson River that probably nobody else in the whole world was watching at the time.
Now, this Anderson River has formed when the continental ice sheet retreated. And over about 10 000 years, it’s been slowly carving into the tundra and then into the Dinosaur Age sandstone, and then finally into the bedrock of a 400-million-year-old limestone.
And in this limestone, preserved, are remains of the animals that lived in the tropical oceans of the Devonian times. And of course, there’s no public transit or road to get there.
So while we have to take the flight on the Twin Otter east from Inuvik, and then land in the middle of tundra, switch over to the helicopter, and then do multiple airlifts to set up that base camp.
And we are after wild living fish as well as fossil fish: we ate what we got from the river. It was an important part of our activity to have something out of that land and incorporate it into our body.
And of course, we are there. Just a few human strangers embedded in the vast landscape of the North. And we happened to be visiting there just by the gracious endorsem*nt coming from the Inuvialuit people who have called this place their homeland.
Now, fish fossils that we are looking for are encased in the limestone. This is basically what happens after the hundreds of millions of years when the mud and the chemical ooze of the dead seashells get compacted and cooked by the forces of the Earth.
And this is by far the hardest rock that I ever dealt with in my career. I brought a pickaxe—just a, you know, standard palaeontological tool to dig around the fossil.
But within the first five swings, there was a loud spark, and the broken bits of the tip of the axe were flying over my head, so it was quite useless.
So we had to rely on the rock saws to carve out the fossils.
And this is one of the most spectacular specimens we found. And, if you have an eye for it, I’m going to show you the silhouette of this magnificent fish. This is the primitive member of the lungfish lineage. When it was alive, it would have measured up to a 1.8 m long.
We have the full front half of this animal. And as we are going through the more than 200 specimens that we found in the field, we noticed something very strange.
Now, these fish seem to be well ahead of their time. Elsewhere in the world, we find similar species in the rocks that are 20 to 30 million years younger—later than the ones in this place.
So they seem to be here much earlier than we ever expected.
This is like going to Pompeii, and you’re digging up iPhones instead of the potteries or the pans or things like that, and those iPhones have ChatGPT installed—and you’re scratching your head.
This is something strange. You know, “What’s happening here?” So that’s basically the question that we are trying to answer, spending years of research and fieldwork from this point on.
It’s been about six months since we came back from this fieldwork, but it was such a magnificent place that I still find myself often thinking about this place.
By now, of course, it must be very dark and cold and frozen solid.
Everything must be encased in the thick pad of ice and snow.
You may be only able to see the treetops of these black spruce.
That reminds me of the words by the late wildlife photographer Mitchell Hotchner,
who said that, all the while we live our lives in this civilization or even right at this point, out there in the Arctic wilderness passes different time, as steady and eternal as the river flows.
And, of course, when the ice breaks up and the spring flood washes over this valley, the blooming wildflowers will signal the arrival of a fleeting summer.
It’s another field season. So next time when I get back there, I do a drop down in this place.
So this canyon just showed up—on the last day. The last day of the fieldwork. We hopped on the helicopter on the way back to our meeting point with the Twin Otter and, just five minutes downstream of the flight, this vast canyon of Devonian limestone showed up.
I didn’t really expect this. I didn’t find this on the satellite images because of the vegetation cover. When I was using the aerial images, I couldn’t really find this place, but now we were flying low on the helicopter. We’re just marvelling at just how many more weird and fantastical fossils that are waiting for us here.
This is a metaphor. It’s a good reminder that we spent three weeks travelling up and down this river to find fossils, and by the end of it, we felt like we learned lots about this place.
But then just to hop on the helicopter and then this unexpected place showed up, so that’s a reminder for me of how little we really know. And no matter how hard you work to understand this one thing, there was always much, much more to discover.
Okay. Thank you.
