Nunavut’s fish fossil treasures come home to Canada
“It’s a real special part of the history of life and of the history of our planet”
These are some of the original fish-fossil specimens from Ellesmere Island that returned to Canada this week for storage at the Canadian Museum of Nature. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)
This model attempts to represent what Tiktaalik, the ancient fish that crawled on land, may have looked like. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)
Ted Daeschler, a paleontologist with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, displays the skull of Tiktaalik, the 375-million-year-old fish whose sensational discovery in 2004 filled a major gap in our knowledge of how land-based creatures emerged from the sea. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)
OTTAWA — After spending the last 10 years in the hands of the researchers from the United States who found them on Ellesmere Island, a precious collection of globally-renowned Nunavut fish fossils came back to Canada this week for safe-keeping at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
And until Nunavut builds a long-awaited museum described in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, that’s where they’ll stay.
“That great new territory does not have a natural history museum. One day, when they do have a museum up in that territory, we will just move these back up to their place,” Mark Graham, the Canadian Museum of Nature’s vice president of research and collections, told reporters June 22.
At the centre of the collection is an astonishing set of fossilized bones that have added a big chunk of new knowledge to the history of evolution: Tiktaalik roseae.
The name Tiktaalik was suggested by Inuit elders. “Roseae” represents the given name of an anonymous supporter named Rose who donated money to help fund the research project.
Sometimes dubbed “fishapod,” Tiktaalik is likely the first vertebrate creature to leave the ocean and crawl onto land.
The ancient fish was able to breathe with a primitive set of lungs and its fins were beginning to evolve into legs.
“It’s a real special part of the history of life and of the history of our planet,” said Ted Daeschler, a paleontologist with Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia who participated in an event at the museum’s fossil collection centre in Gatineau.
Daeschler was part of a team that included Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and the late Farish Jenkins of Harvard University.
They found the fossilized skull of Tiktaalik in 2004, during the sixth year of a research project that started in 1998 near Bird Fiord on the southwest corner of Ellesmere Island, where the age of the area’s sedimentary rock is estimated at between 363 and 380 million years.
That’s just the right age for the kind of fossils the team sought and their calculated guess-work paid off. They eventually turned up fossilized bones left by the bodies of at least 10 different examples of the ancient amphibious creature.
In 2006, they published an article in the journal Nature that — in the world of paleontology and evolutionary biology — turned Tiktaalik into an overnight sensation.
“It’s remarkable material. They’re beautiful fossils, remarkably well preserved,” Daeschler said in an interview.
Daeschler said the discovery of Tiktaalik is likely as significant as the discovery of the archaeopteryx, a winged, bird-like dinosaur with feathers that marks the evolutionary transformation of reptiles into birds.
He even compared its significance to the 1970s-era discovery in Ethiopia of Lucy, a hominid who walked upright and is a likely ancestor of modern humans.
And Tiktaalik marks an equally important step in the evolution of life on Earth, Daeschler said.
“Over the next 10 million years or more, some of the features Tiktaalik was developing became useful for new ecological niches, and evolution was slowly selecting those features and it became more terrestrial,” he said.
Neil Shubin, Daeschler’s research partner, used their Tiktaalik research in a recent book called Your Inner Fish, which argues that Tiktaalik’s DNA likely survives in all land-based creatures, including human beings.
His book also formed the basis of a three-part documentary series broadcast in the U.S. last year on PBS.
“What you are seeing today is a special part of Canadian heritage and world heritage, when fish began to take the first steps on land. Tiktaalik roseae is wonderful window into that fabulous moment,” Shubin said.
Shubin praised the Government of Nunavut, the people of Grise Fiord, the Museum of Nature and the Polar Continental Shelf Project in Resolute Bay for making the project possible.
“We’re really here because of the fabulous support that Canada lends to basic research,” he said.
Another creature that the team discovered, a fish called Holoptychius bergmanni, is named after Martin Bergmann, the respected Polar Continental Shelf Project director who died in the 2011 crash of First Air flight 6560 in August 2011.
Under Article 33 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, the fossils are owned jointly by Inuit and government — but they can’t be stored in Nunavut.
So right now, the GN pays about $1 million a year to store an estimated 150,000 artifacts at institutions in Yellowknife and Ottawa.
In recent years, the cost of an estimated 6,700 square-foot heritage centre in Nunavut has been pegged at around $120 million and there’s little sign that the territorial government will find that money any time soon.
So for the foreseeable future, the fossils will stay at the Canadian Museum of Nature’s storage facility in Gatineau, where they will at least be accessible to researchers who wish to study them.
“The next step is to make sure that they are here for the future, for researchers to use them again and again and again, because the questions will never end. There are always new questions,” Ted Daeschler said.
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