{"id":37725,"date":"2022-02-15T00:05:23","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T08:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=37725"},"modified":"2022-02-22T08:58:13","modified_gmt":"2022-02-22T16:58:13","slug":"whales-in-the-cliff-face","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/whales-in-the-cliff-face\/","title":{"rendered":"Whales in the Cliff Face"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Suntok pushes through a tangle of blackberry bushes. It\u2019s a gray July morning on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and the smell of smoke from a wildfire to the north mixes with the briny sea breeze. Suntok looks up for a moment, gazing at the pale sky, then picks his way down a beach access clogged with tree trunks. Along the shore, the tide has retreated, revealing an expanse of boulders coated in blankets of slick, verdant algae. Seagulls wheel overhead as the waters of nearby Muir Creek flow into the Salish Sea.<\/p>\n

Suntok works as a criminal defense lawyer in Victoria, British Columbia\u2019s capital city, but he spends much of his spare time in the service of science, collecting rare fossils that he donates to museums. For at least a decade and a half, he has searched shores and river gorges across Vancouver Island, collecting a wide variety of fossilized specimens\u2014including the dental plate of a previously unknown fish, Canadodus suntoki<\/em>, which paleontologists named after him, and a rare species of crab from a beach near Campbell River, where the species was once plentiful. But of the many sites he checks regularly, few match the rock formations along Muir Creek beach when it comes to vertebrate fossils. In some spots, the sandstone cliffs and intertidal boulders are studded with fossil shells and bits of fossilized bone that date to more than 23 million years ago. It\u2019s in this ancient boneyard that Suntok has made some of his most intriguing discoveries\u2014the fragmentary remains of ancient whales that lived and died in the ocean here tens of millions of years ago.<\/p>\n

\"fossilized<\/a>

Fossil hunter Stephen Suntok points to a dark fossilized bone fragment in a cliff face at Muir Creek beach on British Columbia\u2019s Vancouver Island. The Pacific Northwest is one of the world\u2019s hotspots for marine fossils that date to between 33.9 and 23 million years ago\u2014an eventful time in whale evolution. Photo by Devon Bidal<\/p><\/div>\n

This morning, Suntok has agreed to take me along for a visit to this fossil site. In the distance, lush green forest spills over the tops of the cliffs that border the beach. As we slowly approach the site, weaving along the slippery beach rocks, Suntok begins scanning every boulder we pass for fossils. Up close, the curved, overhung cliff face looks barren and austere, like something from a sci-fi movie set on another planet. Each layer of stratigraphy is a stark stripe of brown, beige, or gray, and some are flecked with white shells. These rocks date to an epoch known as the Oligocene, which stretched from 33.9 to 23 million years ago. It was a time of global cooling, when grasslands expanded on land, and mammals such as horses, camels, and primates began spreading out.<\/p>\n

Suntok slides a pair of reading glasses onto his nose, then hunches down and rolls onto his back to get a better look at a low shelf near the base of the cliff. Fossils can sometimes be extremely difficult to spot, he explains. The first vertebrate fossils he found at Muir Creek belonged to an extinct species of Oligocene whale, but initially, all he could see on the surface of the rock was a tiny half-moon-shaped irregularity. It was the tip of a fossilized bone. Subsequent excavation revealed three fossil vertebrae locked in the rock. Since then, Suntok has scoured this beach dozens of times. It always looks different, he says, because the waves chip away at the cliffs, revealing new surfaces to check.<\/p>\n

At the base of the cliff, Suntok continues poring over the low shelf, checking small irregularities in the rock. Soon, he spots a sliver of fossilized bone\u2014possibly a small fragment of a rib from an ancient marine mammal. But Suntok opts to leave it in place. It\u2019s just a scrap and removing it without the right tools would result in damage. He is only carrying a hammer and chisel today. In British Columbia, fossils found on Crown land are protected as heritage objects under the Land Act, and fossil hunters are required to report major finds so that skilled researchers can take them out with the proper tools and methods. But it\u2019s good practice to report fossils whenever they are found.<\/p>\n

\"Stephen<\/a>

Suntok, a lawyer by profession, spends much of his spare time scouring Vancouver Island for rare fossils that he donates to museums. One of his finds, a new species of fish, was named after him\u2014Canadodus suntoki<\/em>. Photo by Devon Bidal<\/p><\/div>\n

Suntok is patient when it comes to fossil hunting. He has seen for himself how precious these pieces of fossilized bone can be for the researchers who study ancient whales and other marine life. \u201cEverything I\u2019ve found is just a rock \u2026 until a paleontologist who knows what they\u2019re doing studies this thing and describes it and puts flesh on the bone,\u201d he says. \u201cBefore that, it\u2019s just a curiosity in my cabinet.\u201d Each whale fossil, after all, is a potential clue to the long and complex story of cetaceans, and to the dramatic transformations they underwent over millions of years. Moreover, the study of ancient whales has taken on new relevance in an era of rapid climate change. A better understanding of the remarkable evolution of cetaceans could assist researchers and conservationists alike in protecting whales in the future, as these leviathans are confronted with the increasingly harsh realities of a world dominated by humans.<\/p>\n

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Whales are among the largest animals to ever exist on Earth, with some adult blue whales reaching 180 tonnes, nearly 21 times the weight of a Tyrannosaurus rex<\/em>. And the long history of whales, which spans more than 50 million years, is chock-full of surprises. The earliest whales lived near water\u2014but not in it\u2014and they looked very different from the whales we know today. Pakicetus<\/em>, for example, was a wolf-sized animal with four legs, a long snout, and a big tail. It hunted small prey along the coastal margins of Pakistan some 50 million years ago. But what links Pakicetus<\/em> and the other early whales to modern cetaceans is a distinctive anatomical feature they all share: a bulbous structure in their ears known as an involucrum. This ancient structure may assist today\u2019s whales and dolphins in hearing underwater. Early whales also had distinctive double-pulley ankle bones seen only in even-toed hoofed mammals, like camels and cows, which are now understood to be whales\u2019 closest relatives.<\/p>\n

\"illustration<\/a>

The earliest whales didn\u2019t have flippers and blowholes: they walked on four legs and lived on land. Pakicetus<\/em>, shown above, was a wolf-sized whale that roamed the coasts of what is now Pakistan some 50 million years ago. Illustration by Roman Uchytel\/Science Photo Library<\/p><\/div>\n

As cetaceans evolved, forelimbs became flippers, nostrils shifted back to become blowholes, and legs eventually disappeared. It took whales about 10 million years to transition from land to sea, and they may have done so for a variety of reasons, which include escaping predation on land and capitalizing on abundant marine prey. But once whales were completely aquatic, they spent the next 40 million years adapting fully to life in the ocean. For much of this time, most cetaceans were little bigger than a humpback whale. Then, beginning around 4.5 million years ago, whales underwent another remarkable transformation. Many began bulking up dramatically, eventually reaching their current extreme sizes. That allowed them to bump up the amount of prey they consumed in one gulp, swim vast distances to reach places with abundant food sources, and fight off most marine predators.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the basic, broad trajectory, but huge gaps remain in our knowledge of whales\u2014including how baleen evolved in some species. And that\u2019s where whale fossils come in. Fossil bones preserve enormous amounts of information, and whale fossils from the Oligocene era are particularly valuable, given the many changes that cetaceans went through at that time. The trouble is that marine fossils from that era are exceedingly difficult to find in most parts of the world. Sea levels during the Oligocene were much lower than today, so fossilized marine life from that time tends to lie deep beneath the ocean\u2014beyond the reach of paleontologists.<\/p>\n

But in a few parts of the world, scientists have discovered rock formations on land that are littered with these rare Oligocene marine fossils. The Pacific Northwest is one such place. Sometimes, when whales and other marine animals died in the shallow oceans of the Oligocene, their skeletons were buried by sediment on the seafloor. Over time, the sediment hardened into layers of rock, and the bones sandwiched between these layers slowly petrified, becoming fossils. Eventually, major geological processes pushed these Oligocene layers above sea level in the Pacific Northwest. At localities like Muir Creek, strong waves and heavy winter rains batter the cliff faces, eroding the rock and revealing the fossils within.<\/p>\n

\"Bits<\/a>

Bits of fossil shells dating back more than 23 million years stud a layer of rock at Muir Creek beach. The locality\u2019s rich fossil record, which includes the remains of ancient cetaceans, is helping paleontologists to understand the complex evolution of whales. Photo by Devon Bidal<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s basically kind of a combination of the right conditions 25 million years ago, and then the right conditions today,\u201d says Victoria Arbour, the curator of paleontology at the Royal BC Museum (RBCM) in Victoria. She and a recent University of Victoria graduate, Elizabeth Rohlicek, have been trying to identify a collection of cetacean fossils from Muir Creek and nearby Kirby Creek, and piece together the stories they tell about whales in the Pacific long ago.<\/p>\n

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On a midsummer morning in a darkened gallery at the RBCM, Arbour and Rohlicek lead the way through a new exhibit on killer whales. Whale calls echo and blue lights swirl across the killer whale models and Free Willy<\/em> memorabilia, as Arbour, on maternity leave, pushes a stroller holding her newborn son, Oswald, or Ozzy for short. A leading expert on armored dinosaurs, Arbour clearly loves all things paleontology. Her Twitter feed brims with artists\u2019 reconstructions of dinosaurs and other extinct animals, and she is fond of fossil-themed fashion. Today, she\u2019s sporting a collared shirt teeming with tiny dinosaurs. Behind her, Rohlicek, the 23-year-old former student she\u2019s mentoring, flashes a bright smile. Animated and self-assured, Rohlicek lights up when she gushes about ancient whales.<\/p>\n

\"Victoria<\/a>

Victoria Arbour, the curator of paleontology at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, has spent most of her career studying dinosaurs. But during the pandemic, she and a student from the University of Victoria began delving into the field of whale evolution by studying fossilized bones collected locally. Photo by Brandy Yanchyk<\/p><\/div>\n

Midway through the exhibit, the museum\u2019s collections manager joins us. He\u2019s pushing a cart stacked with some of the fossils found at Muir Creek. Most of these specimens, Rohlicek explains, are marked with information about where they were found and by whom. The bones and fragments\u2014ranging from complete vertebrae and rib bones to a piece of skull\u2014were collected by fossil finders, including Suntok, over the past 60 years. All of the specimens, however, were sitting in storage, waiting to be identified and studied when Arbour and Rohlicek began their research project in the fall of 2020.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not uncommon for fossils to sit in museum drawers for decades before they are investigated, says Arbour, who joined the RBCM in 2018. Sometimes, there\u2019s insufficient people power at museums to study them, and other times, it\u2019s a lack of people with the right research background for a project. But often curators must wait until a collection holds enough specimens to tell a story. That\u2019s why paleontologists urge fossil hunters to donate their finds to a university or museum where they can be preserved for future studies. A single rib from Muir Creek wouldn\u2019t have prompted a research project, Arbour explains, but by the time Rohlicek, then an undergraduate student, joined her lab in early 2020, the collection had accumulated enough specimens to ensure an interesting takeaway.<\/p>\n

\"Elizabeth<\/a>

Elizabeth Rohlicek, a recent University of Victoria graduate, holds a hefty fossilized whale bone from Muir Creek. After months of detailed research at the Royal BC Museum, she identified the bone as a vertebra from Basilosaurus<\/em>\u2014an early whale with a large eel-like body. Photo by Kristina Blanchflower<\/p><\/div>\n

Rohlicek was majoring in biology and earth and ocean sciences at the time but had become enamored with paleobiology\u2014a branch of paleontology that investigates the evolution of fossil species and how they fit into ancient ecosystems. She was considering a career in paleobiology and contacted Arbour to hear how women fare in this field, which is still dominated by men. With Arbour\u2019s encouragement, she began volunteering in the RBCM\u2019s paleontology lab. And after the museum was forced to close its doors in 2020 due to the pandemic, Arbour invited her to assist with a study of the Muir Creek fossil collection. Rohlicek leaped at the opportunity.<\/p>\n

Access to the museum labs was restricted, however. So, starting in the fall, the two women met at the museum every Wednesday evening after closing and rolled a mobile lab\u2014a plastic cart stocked with marine fossils, measuring tapes, and sketch pads\u2014into the public Natural History Gallery. Next to a life-sized mammoth sculpture known affectionately as Woolly, they got to work, poring over the specimens by lamplight as the ambient nature sounds from the exhibit played on a loop\u2014the soundtrack to their research.<\/p>\n