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Museum scientists back at work in the field

Digging for dinosaurs in Alberta, diving for seaweed in the Arctic, or prospecting for minerals in British Columbia—these are just a few of the activities that our researchers are undertaking in summer 2022. The season marks a return to fieldwork for many of the museum’s experts, following two years of pandemic restrictions.   

Here are highlights some of the fieldwork completed, underway, or still to come.

Digging for dinosaurs in Alberta   In June and early July, Dr. Jordan Mallon continued the excavation of a Centrosaurus bonebed in southeastern Alberta, a project that he has been leading since 2015. Joining in the dig were Dr. Scott Rufolo, Curator of Palaeobiology, collections technician Alan McDonald, and students from Carleton University, the University of Alberta and Leeds University. 

Dozens of bones were collected, including a nearly complete skull that had been excavated two years prior. Mallon also found time to give a tour of the site to local residents, and to talk about his fieldwork to students at the community elementary school.

Uncovering ice-age fossils in Yukon   Dr. Danielle Fraser, the museum’s palaeomammalogist, ventured in July to the Old Crow region in Yukon, along with her University of Ottawa Ph.D student Zoe Landry. This area is renowned for its rich yield of ice-age fossils, many of which are represented in the museum’s quaternary collection.

During their two weeks in the field, the two camped at a site that Fraser notes is known as the ‘supermarket’, because one can walk along the beach and find hundreds of ice-age fossils. And indeed they did, as they found many bones of horse and bison, as well as some material of Homotherium, a type of scimitar cat that was the second largest feline species to live in Yukon during the Ice Age (after the American lion).

Diving for seaweed in Arctic waters   In July, museum phycologist Dr. Amanda Savoie, a marine seaweed expert, joined an international team funded by EU Horizon. She collected seaweed samples along the shoreline of the immense Porsanger fiord in northern Norway and contributed to biodiversity surveys. The work is part of a larger, multi-year international study of the impacts of climate change in the Arctic.  

After returning from Norway, Savoie will lead her first field expedition as a museum researcher. Starting in mid-August, she will examine seaweed diversity in the waters around Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island, Nunavut, with an eye to document a kelp forest. Cambridge Bay is home to the Canadian High Arctic Research Station. She will work with scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada as well as ArcticNet. The project, in collaboration with Polar Knowledge Canada, will involve scuba diving. Support staff at the station will provide critical logistics support, including experienced divers and equipment such as boats.  

VIDEO: Seaweeds are superstars—find out why

Hi everyone. My name is Dr. Amanda Savoie and I’m a research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

One of the best parts of my job is getting to speak to the public about my work on seaweed and about marine biology in Canada.

And every time I do any kind of public outreach I almost always get the same question.

So technically seaweeds are a type of algae.

Algae are aquatic photosynthetic organisms. They’re found all over the world and seaweed specifically are a type of algae that are marine. That means they’re found in the ocean.

And seaweeds are also macroscopic. That means they’re big. You can see them without a microscope. Seaweeds are found all across the globe

from the Arctic to Antarctica and everywhere in between. They’re found in the intertidal zone between the high tide line and the low tide line and in the shallow subtide.

Collecting seaweeds is really fun. You can wait until the tide goes out all the way.

You get your rubber boots and your rain pants on and you go down into the intertidal zone with a couple plastic bags and collect the specimens that you’re interested in. Or alternatively you can scuba dive and

you bring a few mesh bags and you collect the samples that you want right from the ocean floor. Either way you bring everything back to the lab and you press these samples in between thick sheets of cardboard and paper.

And this removes all the water and dries your specimen. In the collections of the Canadian Museum of Nature we have some specimens that are more than 200 years old.

We have more than 20,000 samples of seaweed from all around the world. This is an amazing resource for studying seaweed diversity.

And while you can’t eat the specimens that are stored at the museum, you can eat seaweed.

It’s a globally very important food source and it’s delicious.

Probably the most common seaweed that you may have eaten is nori. Nori is the kind of seaweed that’s used to wrap sushi. So if you’ve had sushi, you’ve eaten seaweed.

But there are many other delicious kinds of seaweed that you can eat.

And then finally people ask me, why are seaweed important, you know why do you study them?

And there’s so, so many different reasons but a couple of the most important are that they produce oxygen. So they produce

some of the oxygen that we breathe every day. They are an important habitat and food source for marine organisms. And then finally they’re also a carbon sink.

So as they grow if they take up carbon dioxide and this is especially true in

the west coast of Canada where there’s large kelp forests that grow very quickly.

So next time you’re at the ocean give some thought to the amazing diversity and importance of seaweed.

Exploring for minerals in the mountains of BC   In 2021, mineralogists Dr. Paula Piilonen and Glenn Poirier explored a sodalite deposit at a mining claim in southeast British Columbia. The area is part of a geological “province” known for its alkaline rock formations that include economic deposits of rare elements and rare-earth elements. The two will be returning this summer, joined by Dr. Inna Lykova, Acting Curator of Mineralogy, to explore a nearby claim, the Ice River complex. As in 2021, they will collect samples for analysis and study in order to describe the mineral diversity of the region.

Identifying botanical diversity in Yukon   In July, botanists Dr. Troy McMullin and Paul Sokoloff contributed their expertise to the identification of lichens and vascular plants for a three-day bioblitz in western Yukon. They explored a range of terrain and ecosystems in a part of Canada that neither had before visited. The pair have numerous Arctic field expeditions to their credit. Following their Yukon fieldwork, they attended the Botany 2022 conference in Anchorage, Alaska.

Collecting beetles in Cuba   In May, entomologists Dr. Bob Anderson and Dr. Andrew Smith explored the western part of Cuba. Anderson has spent decades collecting and documenting beetle diversity (mainly weevils) in the Caribbean, as well as in Central and South America. Historically, few scientists have been allowed permission to enter Cuba, conduct fieldwork and export their specimens, so the country has been “poorly collected”, notes Anderson. The scientists collaborated with professors from Universidad de Oriente and from Universidad de Havana to collect thousands of specimens—with new species likely among the diversity of insects they amassed.

Documenting the stories of two mussel species   Closer to the museum’s home in the National Capital Region, malacologist Dr. André Martel, joined by ichthyologists Dr. Katriina Ilves and Noel Alfonso, will be continuing research in the Kinonge River. They are documenting the unusual presence of the Eastern pearlshell mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera), normally known from the St. Lawrence and in Atlantic Canada. Martel will also be researching, along with colleagues from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Ottawa River habitat and presence of the only mussel on Canada’s endangered species list, the Hickorynut (Obovaria olivaria).

Read more about the researchers mentioned in this article and their research projects.  

Keep up to date on the museum’s research activities, exhibitions and other programs by following our social media channels, or subscribe to the Nature News newsletter.

Thanks to a new partnership with Connected North as well as the support of CN, the museum has brought virtual school workshops to even more communities in Canada.

Museum fish scientist Katriina Ilves, Ph. D., joined her first-ever Students on Ice expedition. In June 2022 they sailed to Sable Island in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Among the creatures in the museum’s new Planet Ice exhibition is a beluga unearthed more than a century ago near the village of Pakenham, in Eastern Ontario. Its presence links to a time 13,000 to 10,000 years ago, when the Champlain Sea blanketed parts of Ontario and Quebec.

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Pierre Poirier © Canadian Museum of Nature