Past Meetings (assuming the standard direction for the flow of time)

There was a considerable break between meetings while we moved to our new venue at Marion Hall (courtesy of the Department of Geology, University of Ottawa and Dr. Hattori).

Our first meeting after we resumed was a presentation by one of the "old guard" of the club, Robert Sensentein. It focused on a vacation he took which consisted primarily of being a night watchmen for a leatherback sea turtle breeding area. It concluded with an interesting comparison between the leatherback's notched jaw structure and that of Dunkleosteus. If this is a case of convergent evolution it could go either way, begging the question: "Did the Leatherback derive from a fish predator or did Dunkleosteus derive from a jellyfish/cnidarian predator?"

In the picture above: In front of the table is Dr. Sato who was working on plesiosaurs at the Museum of Nature and volunteered to open the room for us. Behind the table on the left are two of our most experienced "paleozoic predators", (those rare creatures that draw their sustainance from long extinct prey), Frank Habets and Robert Sensenstein (if you mix their names you get Frankenstein and Rabbits). On the right is Ernesto Delgrado who has been very active in helping to organise the speakers series and keep the club alive. In the background on can see new club members Evelyn Palmers and Carola Courtenay.

This was our second meeting after we resumed. The slide projector was incompatible with the portable computer but we were able to crowd around the screen in a pleasant way.

The presentation was done by Jean Dougherty. She has been a strong supporter of the club and we were glad to be able to have her visit again. She is also the curator for the invertebrate fossil collection at the Geological Survey of Canada. This is collection is very important as it contains Canada's type specimens. You can think of it as where all of the fossil celebrities that most of us know of as only photographs in books hang out.

The presentation covered the key figures in invertebrate paleontology in the history of the GSC. The GSC was founded in 1842 in order to map out resources needed for the expansion into the interior of Canada (initially coal, then the critical resource, was only known in the maritimes and in at least one case tar was poured over a cliff face to dupe potential investors passing by on a ship). To better situate the time of the GSC founding it is important to remember that this was all a new field, the geological column and use of fossils for dating was only proposed in and around 1830 (12 years earlier).

What follows is a proud history of some of the greatest geologists in the history of Canada. Until taxonomists became widely available in the second half of the twentieth century the paleontologists of the GSC were self-taught naturalists accomplishing great feats of documentation, description and collection with limited resources often working for seasons by themselves (including the case of Alice E. Wilson who faced many artificial challenges as Canada's first female geologist). For more information see the GSC's history website