Marvellous Molluscs

(photo by Hans Thater)

Gastropods (snails and their relatives) are the most diverse molluscs, so it seemed appropriate that the gastropod case should hold the greatest variety of specimens!

This has been a year rich in exhibit work, and we are finishing off with a bit of a bang. About a week ago we finished installation of our latest Discovery Room exhibit, a collaboration between Zoology and Paleontology entitled The World is Their Oyster: Marvellous Molluscs. As with the other D-Room exhibits we have produced (such as Jaws and Teeth and Colours in Nature), this was a collaborative effort. It was a pleasure to again work with Randy Mooi on selecting suitable specimens and preparing copy, and to collaborate with our superb collections and exhibit staff to produce the finished exhibit.

The idea for this exhibit was quite straightforward: to select suitable specimens from our permanent collection, which would depict the wonderful diversity and variability of molluscs. We also wished to give visitors a bit of information about the long fossil record of molluscs, their evolution, and a few “case studies” of particular molluscs or features.


This seemed like a simple sort of thing to do, but of course the view on the ground is never the same as that from 30,000 feet. Most of our issues were associated with the sheer number of mollusc specimens housed in our collections. We knew that there would be many excellent examples to choose from, but we did not appreciate quite how difficult this would be. There were so many to consider that, whenever we chose one beautiful snail for the gastropod case, it seemed there were at least 10 other good ones that could not be included.

The other issue was that molluscs are just so darned interesting, weird, and complicated in their life stories, dietary habits, and evolution. We kept discovering unusual things that we had not been aware of (or at least, I did; I suspect that Randy already knew some of these things). As a result, more and more new ideas came forward, and it was very hard to decide what we could include in the modest panel copy that accompanies the specimens. We were grateful that Stephanie Whitehouse, the designer, was so clear in telling us exactly how much space we had!

As issues and problems go, these were obviously good ones to have. And as these photos show, we were able to share a great variety of beautiful and appealing mollusc material. You will just have to imagine what the cases might have looked like if we had been able to include every single specimen we considered worthy of exhibit!

The cephalopod case

A variety of abalones

The Cold Road

It is 7 am, somewhere on the curves near Woodlands, Manitoba, and the sky is still completely dark. The rain is coming down harder now and approaching headlights are blurred by the slicked windshield. I usually love the open road, but this driving is far from fun.

We are well past Lundar before the late dawn. The traffic has diminished now and the rain has eased a bit, but the wind is rising. At the Ashern Petro-Can we stop for fuel: unleaded for the Jeep and junk food for the humans. Ed takes over the wheel for the next monotonous stretch.

Today we plan to go to William Lake, well north of Grand Rapids, then back to Winnipeg before the evening has progressed too far: a drive of 1000 kilometres or so. Why are we subjecting ourselves to this, in this unpleasant wet weather?

Last summer, in the beautiful warmth of August, we found a greater quantity of interesting rock than we could safely haul back to Winnipeg at the time. In particular, two splendid specimens we discovered on the last day had to be left lying on the outcrop. These were very large slabs, both of which remarkably preserve portions of what appears to be a channel on an ancient tidal flat, filled with fossilized jellyfish! They are the sorts of unusual pieces that the Museum really needs, because they would be very useful for both exhibits and research, and I was determined that we would get them back to Winnipeg before winter.

Then the autumn got busy, very busy, and the trip to retrieve these pieces was placed on the back burner. I began anxiously scanning the calendar and weather forecasts, and determined that October 18th would be the ideal day to make this trip, assuming that it didn’t snow first! Field paleontology is very much a climate-dependent occupation, and we have done this trip north so many times that we know when winter is likely to close our window of opportunity.

So now Ed and I are in a rented Jeep, heading north past the black spruce,  yellow tamaracks and bare-branched aspen. At Fairford there is a tremendous flow of water past the bridge, and the summer’s pelicans are nowhere to be seen. Over the lip of the St. Martin impact crater the road is empty and desolate. Much of it has been repaved recently and is beautifully smooth, but toward the Pas Moraine we hit a rutted stretch and Ed has to slow down to avoid hydroplaning on the long pond under our right-hand tires.

At the old burn south of Grand Rapids, I recall the exact place where we saw a lynx last autumn.  All self-respecting lynxes are clearly hiding out in the dense brush on this nasty wet day!

We stop again at Grand Rapids for fuel. There is more than a half-tank remaining, but it will be a long drive before we are back here again and it is best not to take chances. Fortunately there is someone on duty at the Pelican Landing gas station, because it really wouldn’t be pleasant to “self serve” in the pouring rain.

I am driving now, up the curves and past the beautiful lakes of the Grand Rapids Uplands. We arrive at William Lake just a bit after noon. Now there is snow blasting in on a north wind, and the thermometer is reading a balmy +1 C.   Navigating slowly across the scree, I can see the two large slabs lying right where we left them. After six hours of driving, we now have 15 minutes of physical work: fold down the seat, spread the tarp, slip on gloves, and manhandle the rock into the back. We pause for a few photos, and are grateful that the outdoor work is so brief, because our hands are already frozen and numb.

Our hands thaw as the Jeep crawls back toward the highway. At the Grand Rapids bridge a solitary pelican flies past; perhaps this one was asleep and missed its flight south? Now we a bit of time for lunch at the Pelican Landing restaurant: smoked meat sandwiches, cream of celery soup, and coffee have never been more welcome. We say hello to a few familiar faces; I guess we are becoming “fixtures” here, but I am not sure when we will manage to get back again. It is an appropriate day for this sort of sombre thought.

Now it is time to confront the long road home. As it turns out, the weather for the drive back will be slightly more pleasant, and we cruise smoothly into Winnipeg just as darkness is setting in. It has been a lot of driving to pick up a couple of rocks, but very worthwhile: within a week it will be winter in the Uplands, and if the pieces had been left until spring they would have been heavily weathered and damaged by the winter’s extreme frost and ice.

The Mineral Exhibit

 If you visit this page occasionally and have been wondering about when the next blog post would be forthcoming, well, I had been wondering that too. I have begun new posts several times, but in each instance my focus has been pulled away by the same all-consuming activity: my time has been taken up by the completion of a mineral exhibit. This past week, we finally did the installation, so I thought I had might as well set those posts-in-progress aside yet again. Here, instead, are some photos of the exhibit.

Collections specialist Janis Klapecki and designer Stephanie Whitehouse work on the final location of one of the plexiglas specimen mounts.

At the Museum we had long recognized that a mineral exhibit was one of the features most lacking in the Earth History Gallery. Minerals are the basic building blocks of rocks and other geological materials, we have a great diversity of minerals in this province’s rocks, and of course minerals are often beautiful objects that are treasured by many collectors.

The giant amethyst now has its own gallery case (in the next post I will tell you how we got it there!).

For the past several years we have been collaborating with the Mineral Society of Manitoba to acquire specimens suitable for exhibit, and The Manitoba Museum Foundation and the Canadian Geological Foundation had kindly provided us with funding to construct cases. This exhibit is at the front end of the Earth History Gallery, where we only had space for a couple of cases, and the number of specimens and volume of text were quite limited, so this should have been a simple little exhibit project, no?

Beryls from eastern Manitoba (top), along with pyrites, feldspars, and base metal ores

No. Things are never simple when you have to develop an exhibit from scratch. And in this particular instance our design and exhibit staff were working to develop techniques that we had not tried before.  We had examined mineral exhibits in many other places (both in-person and through photographs) and had decided that we needed dark cases with the light really focused on the specimens.

The mid part of the case features a variety of minerals, including a Tanco rubellite (donated by Cabot Corporation) and samples of beautiful Michigan copper (the tree-like specimen was acquired and donated by the Mineral Society of Manitoba, John Biczok, and Tony Smith).

Stephanie Whitehouse, our designer,  wanted to try working more with metal and glass on this case, and she asked the workshop to look at ways plexiglas could be prepared to allow it to glow. Bert Valentin considered new lighting options (though he eventually settled on fibre optics similar to those in the Ancient Seas cases) and Marc Hébert had to develop new techniques to build cases using different construction materials. Lisa May and Wayne Switek constructed specimen mounts that look simple but had to hold the specimens just so. And once all the pieces were constructed, it still took the team most of last week to assemble them and make everything fit. Dealing with the giant amethyst (now informally rechristened The Mammothist) was a big piece of this process, so big that I will give it its own post in the near future!

This splendid millerite is from Thompson, source of some of the best examples of this unusual nickel mineral. It was acquired for the exhibit by the Mineral Society of Manitoba and The Manitoba Museum Foundation. (catalogue number M-3596)

If you visit the Gallery you will still see the old exhibits between the mineral cases and Ancient Seas, but the space is starting to develop quite a different feel.

For the first time ever, the Earth History Gallery has a title!

From the Manitoba Museum - Geology and Paleontology Blog

Published by Dr. Graham Young

 gyoung@manitobamuseum.ca

Ever since the Museum’s Earth History Gallery opened in the early 1970s, visitors have been struck by the appearance of a giant skeleton near the end of the gallery. Many children (and perhaps more than a few adults) have thought that it is a dinosaur, but it is in fact a mammal from the much more recent past, a replica of the giant ground sloth Megatherium americanum.

Megatherium was a huge ground-dwelling creature, distantly related to the modern tree sloths. Ground sloths were a very successful group, with fossils known from many parts of South and North America (including western Canada), but sadly they disappeared...

Read the rest here...