"Yeeeehaaaaaw" the call heard from a lucky fossil hunter working the outcrops on the west side of the lake... or just as likely the call of the wild as a kayaker hits a pocket of wind on freshwater and feels the power of nature surge under them - ahhh Harrison!  

If you like to try your hand at new things and have a penchant for the old or shiny.. no not your dating taste, but something earthier... you may want to consider a trip to Vermillion Bluffs near the town of Princeton, British Columbia. During the middle Eocene, 45-50 m.y.a., a number of freshwater lakes appeared in an arc extending from Smithers, through the modern Cariboo, to Kamloops, the Nicola Valley, Princeton, and Republic, WA. The lakes probably formed after a period of faulting had produced a number of basins, called grabens into which water collected. The faulting was followed by a time of volcanism that produced periodic falls of fine-grained ash.

Some 270 million plus years ago, had one wanted to buy waterfront property in what is now British Columbia, you’d be looking somewhere between Prince George and the Alberta border. The rest of the province had yet to arrive but would be made up of over twenty major terranes from around the Pacific.



The rock that would eventually become the Cariboo Mountains and form the lakes and valleys of Bowron was far out in the Pacific Ocean, down near the equator. With tectonic shifting, these rocks drifted north-eastward, riding their continental plate, until they collided with and joined the Cordillera in what is now British Columbia.

New evidence of an ancient carnivorous killer has been found in Nigeria. While evidence of 95-million year old therapods from Africa is quite scare making one think that each fragment would be treated like gold, this was not the case the first evidence of Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis, a newly described dinosaur from the Cenomanian of Nigeria and published in this months issue Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. This ancient killer almost had the misfortune of going extinct twice! Tooth fragments collected by Charles Depéret and J. Savornin in 1927 were misplaced before this meat-eater could ever be described and when additional material was collected in Egypt in the 1930’s it also came to an unfortunate end.

Sometimes relationships work out well. Not talking romance here. I'm thinking of the partnership that has evolved between various species who, despite great differences, do rather well together.

In particular, I'm thinking about a most unlikely "couple," sloths and blue-green algae.  Their pairing has provided a home for the algae and a bit of camouflage - the slight greenish hue we see in the sloth's coat.

Location, location, location is the mantra for many of us in our macro world but it is also true for the world of the small and the domain of the wee blue-green algae.

If you were a fish living in the warm turquoise waters off the coast of Bonaire, you may not hear those words, but you'd see the shrimp sign language equivalent. It seems Periclimenes yucatanicus or Spotted Cleaner Shrimp is doing a booming business in the local reefs by setting up a fish washing service. That's right, a Fish Wash. You'd be hard pressed to find a terrestrial Molly Maid with two opposable thumbs as as studious and hardworking as this wee marine beauty. This quiet marine mogel is turning out to be one of the ocean's top entrepreneurs. Keeping its host and diet clean and green, the spotted shrimp hooks up with the locals, in this case, local sea anemones and sets up a fish wash... picture a car wash but without the noise and teenage boys...