Join podcast host Veronica Klassen and guest paleontologist Dr. Daniel Dick as we delve into the creation of a GeoHike at Wainfleet Wetlands. Discover the unique ecosystem of the middle Devonian period through an array of fascinating features: encounter colonial organisms, massive corals, glacial striations, and pop-up structures. We’ll discuss potentially undiscovered fossils, augmented reality animations to bring fossilized animals to life, and what counting layers on rugose corals can tell us about the speed of the Earth’s rotation in the Devonian.

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Episode Transcript:

Dr. Daniel Dick (Dan)

It looks like an ecosystem where the water was just drained out of it. It feels alive and it will really help you understand just how different the world used to be. I think that is the main thing that makes paleontology interesting. It just shows you that the world has changed so much, and it will blow your mind.

[musical interlude]

Veronica Klassen

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator, geology enthusiast and your host. Here at the APGO Education Foundation, our mission is to spark curiosity and passion for the geology of Ontario. Whether you’re a geology nerd, science enthusiast, or nature lover, this podcast is for you. Join us as we geek out over fascinating geology, uncover the hidden stories and secrets of our extraordinary planet, and explore the captivating world beneath your feet.

[musical interlude]

Veronica

All right, let’s get started. Today, I’m going to be talking to Daniel Dick, who is a researcher at McMaster University. Daniel, why don’t you start by telling us a bit about yourself?

Dan

Yeah, I mean, you covered quite a bit there. I’m Dan. I’m a postdoc at McMaster, primarily working on this public outreach project that we’ve been developing over the last few years. Which, in conjunction with the APGO Education Foundation, is developing this website, GeoscienceINFO, and primarily we are working on the GeoHikes.

Research-wise, I’m a paleontologist. I focus primarily on fossils. I work on mass extinction events and trying to understand the dynamics of them, with the end goal of hopefully applying some of the knowledge we might learn from past extinction events to help us understand contemporary extinction dynamics and areas of risk and things like this. Yeah, so, my research sort of takes me all over. It’s primarily focused on Ordovician-Silurian fossils. So that’s a lot of stuff that we find here in Ontario, but also in other parts of Canada and the United States and such.

Veronica

Amazing. So how did you originally get interested in geoscience? Like, what led you here?

Dan

I’ve definitely been interested in it for a very long time. I have photos as a kid at the Royal Tyrrell Museum staring at the fossils, and you can sort of see that it’s already something I’m obsessed with at that point. But the beginning of the journey, I think, was in high school because my high school actually had Earth science courses up to grade 12 in B.C., where that’s sort of more standard.

And I’d kind of forgotten how much I like geoscience, I think until those late courses. And it reminded me, oh yeah, I forgot that this was a thing. And that was something that I enjoyed and was good at as well, which helped.

Veronica

So, it was kind of high school, then you decided to study it in university. Did you go straight into geoscience?

Dan

Yeah, I didn’t actually go straight into it. I went into evolutionary anthropology, so I was focused more on human evolution and human fossils and things like that. But then found myself realizing that the questions and things I was more interested in could more easily be answered by working with non-human fossils, because you need large numbers of things, so you need lots of fossils in order to start to understand things like extinction dynamics and climate change and all that kind of stuff. And so, I switched over to more standard and invertebrate paleontology at that point for my Ph.D., which then looked at those kinds of questions.

Veronica

So, when you say those kinds of questions, you’re talking about extinction events and how we can learn from that? Is what you mean?

Dan

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Veronica

Yeah, for sure. And just for a little bit more context do you want to explain kind of like what the GeoHikes are, what’s like the purpose of the GeoHikes?

Dan

For sure. So basically, like the GeoHikes are kind of a, they’re sort of a freely accessible trail guide in a literal sense, that’s what they are. They take you along an existing hiking trail that has some sort of geologically interesting features on it, and there’ll be a series of stops which will take you to these different features and will describe for a general audience what’s going on geologically.

Occasionally we do other things beyond geology. We also look at ecology, for example, talk about invasive species or we’ll find fossils on some of the hikes, and we’ll talk about ancient ecosystems or mass extinctions or whatever it is we’re doing.

And my personal vision for them, is I see them sort of as a living first year Earth science lecture. They’re simple in the sense that they should be understood by anyone. But instead of having a textbook figure or something explaining the process of erosion or soil formation or something, you go to a physical location where this is all on display. And so, the figure that you would normally look at in a textbook is now there in front of you in real life and offers an opportunity to learn this.

Ideally, the way I see it is if you do enough of these GeoHikes, you will get all the basic information you would need to understand, you know, the sophistication of a first year Earth science course.

Veronica

Cool, that’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve done the one in downtown Toronto. It was super interesting because obviously you don’t think of geology when you’re walking around downtown Toronto. But yeah, just looking at like the different rocks in the buildings and fossils in the buildings and where all the, you know, different types of bricks came from and just interesting things like that. There’s definitely geology in places that you might not expect.

Dan

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Veronica

Do you have any advice for students who are kind of looking for geoscience related opportunities and ways to get involved?

Dan

Well, in a very literal sense, if someone in Canada is listening to this or looking at our website and wants to be involved in some way and you work in a region either where we are currently working or where we’re not currently working, we are always happy to have people who want to try to develop these GeoHikes for us. So it doesn’t take a ton of experience—first year, second year, third year student, it doesn’t matter.

You know, you can definitely reach out and we can discuss putting together one of these hikes in your area. If you know a region that’s really, you know, interesting or has some feature that’s unique. I mean, we have a large network of people working on this kind of thing currently. So, in that sense, it’s very easy to get involved with us.

As for everything else, you know, it’s all about just talking to the people who are actually doing the things you’re interested in, right? If you’re at university already then that’s as simple as just talking to the professors who are doing research and things you’re interested in, and they’ll tend to be a good first point of contact either for the pure research side of things or also for industry or whatever it is you’re interested in.

And of course, if you’re listening to this earlier, you know, if you’re in high school or something like that, and then its essentially the same idea. Talk to, you know, professors or guidance counselors.

And I suppose if you’re not involved in the academic system at all, we have lots of what we call participatory or citizen science projects where you can directly contribute your own material or your own findings to what we’re doing, tell us about interesting locations that you think we should visit. We’re more than willing to have a GeoHike if it was developed following the same principles that we use, developed by anyone. Honestly, there’s no reason why other people couldn’t get involved in this.

Veronica

Yeah, I’d love to hear more about the most recent project that you’ve been working on in Wainfleet. Can you tell us a bit—where is Wainfleet first of all, and why is Wainfleet such an interesting location?

Dan

For sure. So Wainfleet refers to a remediated quarry near Port Colborne in Ontario. So, it’s on the Niagara Peninsula, it’s on the southern part of it, it’s near the northern shore of Lake Erie. So, there’s actually two Wainfleet locations. It’s worth pointing out specifically that we’re talking about Wainfleet Wetlands, the other one is called the Wainfleet Bog.

Wainfleet Wetlands is a remediated limestone quarry. So remediated meaning it’s been sort of returned to nature that there’s no more active mining there. They are sort of reversing the process. Largely that means often flooding in the open quarry itself, turning it into a small lake. And so this mine was originally used for aggregate production, right? So aggregates being like gravel and things used in the production of concrete.

They remediated it in an exceptional way. They did such a good job that they actually won a bronze plaque award acknowledging that they have done such a good job of remediating this area. And you can really see this yourself. I mean, the biodiversity in the area is actually quite high. You go to Wainfleet wetlands and you can walk around and see turtles, for example, will be sunning themselves usually on a given day, and you can find evidence of deer in the area, you can see all sorts of unusual insects and even some weird stuff. I remember when we were there at one point in the early summer, there was this weird fungus called cedar apple rust. It’s kind of creepy looking, but it’s cool because it’s just another sign of biodiversity.

But beyond that, what makes Wainfleet so exceptional and why we’re so interested in it is because it is a natural exposure of the Middle Devonian. This is about 395 million years old. And this is a very important time in Earth history. Its often called the age of fish, because it’s during the Devonian that fish and related organisms really start to diversify and become quite sophisticated. You get the evolution of jaws, for example. Prior to this you have jawless fish, which are a very small and kind of rare part of ecosystems. And by the time you get to the late Devonian, fish are a dominant and very important part of the ecosystem in the same way that we think of them today.

It still makes for an exceptional location because you could learn, I would say, more about geology in one day at Wainfleet than you probably can by visiting any other three locations. And that’s just because it just has so much going for it, right?

So, first of all, I mean, a lot of what we talk about on the GeoHikes is the process of erosion, right? So that’s responsible for the production of things like the Niagara escarpment. It’s also responsible for the production of the Onondaga Escarpment. So right off the bat, you have classic examples of things like weathering and erosion going on in this area.

In addition to this, you have unbelievably extensive and well-preserved fossil deposits. So, there’s sort of two areas in Wainfleet where you can look for fossils. There’s the upper part of the escarpment so where you’re on top of the cliff face, and then there is an exposure below the escarpment. They preserve different time periods and also different environments.

So, the upper escarpment is a very large, what we call a patch reef. So, this is kind of similar to what you might see if you went to the Bahamas today. Lots of complex three-dimensional corals that stick up into the water column and produce lots of little hiding places and things where little fish and stuff would have gone. So, you usually get in these areas very high biodiversity because there’s a lot of space basically for things to make a living.

So that’s what the upper part looks like. So you have a lot of these kinds of large corals, very, very large in some cases you have colonies of, for example, this one called Syringopora—will look just like a bunch of little circles in the rock. But the colony itself is almost the size of a car. It’s enormous.

And on the lower surface, so below the escarpment, you have more of what we call like a hash plate. So just a large chunk of the seafloor, as sort of representing the aggregate collection of material from nearby reefs. It’s a lot of broken and obviously long dead material, but stuff that was sort of washed into these areas from nearby.

And so as a result, you get a lot of trilobites, right? So trilobites are arthropods that are completely extinct today, but at the time of the Devonian and earlier were one of the most dominant and impressive parts of the ecosystem—very interesting organisms that have some of the most complex eyes in Earth’s history, and some of the first organisms to have true vision, for example. We have complex fossils from the time that suggest that trilobites possess perhaps camouflage, for example, as well as defensive behaviors that are preserved in the in the fossil record. In addition to this, you also have bryozoans which are actually alive today, they’re just not as well known. They’re kind of small colonial organisms.

So, colonial organisms—I’ve used that term a lot, I should define it. Colonial organisms are basically animals where what would look like a collection of one large animal is actually made up of several very, very small ones. Right? So coral is the classic example of a colonial organism. If you go to the Bahamas or somewhere in the Caribbean today, you go snorkeling and you look at like a brain coral or staghorn coral or something. What you’re going to see is basically a large like stony formation, right? It looks like, it’s very hard if you were to touch it, and I really wouldn’t recommend that cause some corals can sting you.

But basically there’s this large like stony structure. And then if you look really closely there are what look like almost like little tiny flowers all across the surface of this little stony thing. And those little flower looking things are the actual coral animals. Right? So we call those zooids or zooids and those are individual coral animals and we call them colonial because the entire colony—so each little flower that’s connected to this big sort of stony structure—they’re all working together as sort of one super organism, essentially. But each individual organism is not that full skeleton, but it’s the small sub pieces of it. And so we call that a colonial organism. So any time when lots of little animals are working together, basically, they form a colony and it’s a colonial organism.

So other examples of colonial organisms are things like bryozoans, which look very much like coral, but often quite a bit smaller. And then there are some other more bizarre ones, like things like the Portuguese man o’ war, which is often thought of as a jellyfish, but it’s not. It’s another colonial organism. It’s a bunch of smaller animals working together.

And so Wainfleet is a great example of sort of just how complex and sophisticated colonial organisms get early on. In the sense that, as I said, you have giant coral colonies that are enormous. You could lie down on top of one they’re so big. And then down below you have small sort of fragmented pieces of other colonies, like pieces of corals and pieces of bryozoans.

In addition to this, you have other coral groups that are not colonial, interestingly, and these are the rugose corals, for example, they’re often called the horn corals. They look like animal horns. They’re pretty easy to spot when you’re at Wainfleet. And these are kind of like sea anemones, I would argue that’s probably closest thing you can think of today to them in the sense that they are a single coral polyp but much larger. And so they’re not necessarily living colonially. They often live on their own. We see these a lot in Wainfleet and these guys are part of one of the highlights of Wainfleet.

This is that rugose corals, like all corals, seem to time their reproduction with the phases of the moon in many ways. So they tend to want to release the gametes into the seawater when the moon is full because that produces the highest tide of a given interval. And when the tide is at the highest, these gametes will then spread the farthest distance away. So this has multiple benefits, right? One is that you’re not going to compete with your own offspring if the little tiny coral lands right beside you and starts growing, you may have to actually compete with your own offspring. That’s not good. And in addition, you also just have a higher chance of encountering other gametes from farther away, getting more sort of sophisticated mixing of genetics.

So they tend to do this today and we can sort of see this. And another interesting thing about corals and a lot of other organisms in the marine realm is that they grow their skeleton sort of one day at a time. It’s kind of like tree rings in that you can often count these little layers of growth each day, leaving behind, you know, a light and a dark layer, depending on when it was deposited during the day or during the night.

What’s interesting is if you start to combine these ideas, which is that they’re reproducing when the moon is full, they grow their skeleton once every day and it actually takes a lot of energy to reproduce. So we know that when looking at their skeleton, you can actually see that the day that they reproduce on when the moon is full, the layer tends to be less well developed, right? They don’t spend a ton of time building a skeleton on this day. Instead, they’re going to spend all their energy on reproduction. But because of this, you can count the number of days that pass between the full moon using these layers. For instance you look for the layer that’s sort of unusual then you count the number of days between the next one where it’s unusual like that. And what scientists showed in the sixties that if you count rugose coral growth layers like this, you see that about 30 days pass between the full moon during the Devonian. And that’s unusual because today about 28 days pass between the full moon.

Veronica

Oh, interesting.

Dan

So if you count modern corals or modern bivalves, you’ll see that actually fewer days pass between the phases of the full moon. And what this is telling us is that during the Devonian, the earth was actually rotating much faster than it does today and that there would actually be more days in a year. Because if you were standing on a Devonian seashore and looking at the horizon, you would see the sun rise and set more times as the earth goes around the sun than you would today.

And as a result, the lunar cycle is also longer. And so you have more days passing between full moons in this case. And so it’s quite amazing because physicists had always sort of suggested this is true, that the moon exerts gravitational force on the earth, its responsible for the tides, it pulls on the ocean, and this tidal force actually exerts friction on the earth and has been very slowly slowing the rotation rate over the course of millions of years.

So physicists have always sort of known this to be true. It just makes sense from all the calculations they’ve used. But direct evidence of this is very hard to come by. But it was in the sixties that the first paleontologists working at places like Wainfleet on species that are preserved there using these Middle Devonian corals demonstrated that there was direct evidence that the Earth was actually spinning faster in the past than it was today.

That’s just one of many amazing things that you can learn at this place.

Veronica

That’s super interesting. I did not know that. Do you want to tell us what are some of the other unique geological features you can find at Wainfleet?

Dan

That’s a thing. So there’s a lot more at Wainfleet than just fossils. So for example, in the upper part of the escarpment where the large thicket reef that I was talking about earlier is—if you look closely at it, you’ll notice that the corals are covered in these huge scratches. They all run parallel and they all kind of point in the same direction.

What these are, are glacial striations. So striations form when a glacier is moving across the landscape and underneath the glacier you have other rocks and the huge weight of the glacier—glaciers during the Pleistocene were enormous, we’re talking, you know, kilometers thick—as a result, as they move across the landscape very, very slowly, they’re pushing these rocks along the underside of them up against the stone below them. And they’re scratching these deep grooves into the rock.

And these grooves are actually showing the direction that the glacier was moving in. So you can actually see this at Wainfleet. It’s quite amazing. You have hundreds of million year old ancient fossil coral and then you have thousands of year old striations formed by massive glaciers during the ice age.

So that’s just one example. There’s another example. So if you go down below the escarpment, you can find what might be—and we’re not 100% sure about this, this is a bit of an active research question—but there are what appear to be what are called pop-up structures.

So pop-up structures fall into what are called neotectonic features. So neotectonic features are tectonic features that are occurring kind of in the present day. And so a pop-up structure is basically if you when you see it, it would just look like kind of like a ridge along the stone. Quite literally its where something has popped up out of place and they’re thought to form from faults sort of squishing rocks perpendicular to themselves until the pressure gets so great that it just cracks and pops up into this long stretched out ridge along the ground.

There’s other possibilities. For example, it’s possible that maybe this pop-up structure formed from the removal of large amounts of stone during the quarrying process, or perhaps something to do with the blasting. It’s not entirely sure exactly what formed these things, but you can see them while you’re there. They’re these big long ridges of cracked stone that have popped up off the surroundings.

And I think it’s quite interesting in itself to look at these because they are a bit of a mystery. And I do think that of all the sciences, I think people tend to think that earth science is sort of solved or finished, but this is not true. And you can even see this at Wainfleet, that there are structures here that are not fully understood, that are a bit of a mystery.

And they’re not just interesting for their own sake. If they are a tectonic feature, for example, right, then they’re telling us something about the structure of the earth in this area—something very important that we may not necessarily have appreciated. You can go to Wainfleet and you can see one of these sort of mysterious structures and really ponder it for yourself.

Veronica

Yeah, all of this info is going to go into the GeoHike, is that correct?

Dan

Yes. So each one of these things that I’ve described is going to be a stop on the GeoHike. You will be able to go directly to the pop-up structures and look at them. We’ll take you directly to the striations so you can look at them. We’ll also have 3D models created of these things so you don’t have to necessarily go there if you want to just look at a 3D model reconstruction of this on our website, it’ll be there as well.

Veronica

Exactly. And yeah, that was kind of my next question, which is like what sort of technology you’re using in order to give people a better understand of what these features are and what they look like?

Dan

Yeah, so we’re using a couple things. Because Wainfleet has so many more features than the average location we’re using more technology here than we normally do. So for example, we commissioned an artist to create an animation that reconstructs the ecosystem that’s present at Wainfleet. It takes quite a bit of experience to know what you’re looking at when looking at fossils. And so we’re doing is we’re using animations that will reconstruct the whole ecosystem. So you can watch a video that will show you what it would have looked like when everything was alive.

In addition to this, we’re creating sort of augmented reality style animations where we will take you to a specific location where there will be fossils in the stone below you, and then we’ll have an image of that exact rock, and then basically the fossils that are identified in this will then be animated or come to life right there where you’re looking at them.

So for example, if you’re looking at an Eldredgeops trilobite, it will crawl in from off the side of the screen, display some behaviors that we have direct scientific evidence for, and it will show you this is the behaviors of the trilobite, and this is sort of the way it would have lived. All while it’s crawling around on top of a physical, fossilized version of itself. So we’ve got images like that.

And then, of course, we’re using our more standard suite of tools that we use at all the GeoHikes. So for example, we use lidar, which is basically just a type of scanning system that can be used to create 3D models that capture the topography of an area. And then it also stitches together photographs taken at the same time so that it looks basically like a 3D model exactly capturing whatever environmental feature we’re looking at.

So, for example, we’ve scanned some of these corals and so you’ll be able to see, you know, how high they are relative to the surroundings, and also you can see their structures, so you’ll be able to see like the little individual areas where the little organisms were living at the time and all these little details. So you almost get the same experience of going to this location without physically having to go there.

Veronica

Right, awesome. It’s so cool how we have these technologies now that we can use to really help geoscience communication. Alright, another just like fun question, because I know there’s so much at Wainfleet that we might not be able to talk about all of it, but what is your favourite feature at Wainfleet?

Dan

I think the lower surface of the escarpment, where you have all these little fragmented fossil organisms, is my favourite feature because it’s like a little scavenger hunt.

So I should mention, we’re going to be working closely with the Royal Ontario Museum to put together a field guide for the fossils in this area, so that you can identify anything you come across. If we don’t cover it in our own GeoHike stops, where we take you to specific locations and say, ‘Oh you’re looking at this right now.’ If you walk around, you’ll notice all kinds of things, many of which we don’t talk about directly in the GeoHike. It’s that sort of scavenger hunt element of it that I really like.

And also in a literal sense, you could potentially serve as a paleontologist in this exact area. So in this sense, if you’re looking around at this scavenger hunt like area, and you’re consulting this field guide that we’re making with the Royal Ontario museum and you find something that’s not on there, this could potentially be an undiscovered species from this area or something totally new to science.

It’s entirely possible that it is. If this is the case, reach out to us, tell us what you found. And it’s maybe possible that you could actually be involved in direct scientific research in this area. So I think that’s what’s so exciting about it, is that because there’s so many little pieces all around, there is this sort of exciting element of that any moment now you might kick aside the dust and find something that no one’s ever seen before.

Veronica

Yeah, that’s super cool. Like, how many places could you go that you know, there might be things that nobody has ever documented before?

Dan

Yeah, I consulted the literature on this area before we went there, of course, But it didn’t take very long to find—not necessarily new things, not undiscovered things—but things that no one had ever said were found at this place in particular. And so, yeah, it’s entirely possible.

Veronica

Yeah. And you were mentioning that there was like a rugose coral that you had found?

Dan

Yeah. So it’s called siphonophrentis gigantea and it’s one of the largest rugose corals that ever lived. So most rugose corals grew to be maybe four or five inches in height, whereas siphonophrentis gigantea is upwards of like almost two feet long. And it’s huge. But no one had ever mentioned seeing siphonophrentis gigantea at this location.

It’s not unusual to find it, it’s a classic middle Devonian organism. But it is interesting to see that despite the fact that theses had been written on this area, publications had come out on this area, no one had mentioned this before. In addition to this, it’s a very well preserved specimen. So it shows us the size of this thing much better than you often would expect. Normally you find pieces of it, you kind of infer that it must have been huge. But this time we have like the entire thing.

And this is just one example, there are tons of things that we’ve come across there that sort of raise an eyebrow and make you wonder what you’re looking at. And they also kind of just hammer home how bizarre these ancient ecosystems were, because in many ways, they can be so different from today.

Veronica

Yeah, that’s so true. I like how you said, that people sometimes think that geology is done or that we’ve figured things out or found everything. But I think it’s so interesting that there’s always more to find, more to see. It’s cool.

Do you have any tips for people who want to go in person to Wainfleet?

Dan

Yeah, so I’ll mention that the reason we are so interested in it—in addition to its obvious, you know, natural beauty and such—is that it falls within the boundary of the Niagara Aspiring Geopark. So if you’re not familiar with this, basically UNESCO has an initiative where they are producing a set of what are called Global Geoparks. And these are areas that are conserving the geodiversity and geoheritage of the earth, right? So they are areas with spectacular exposed geology.

So, if the Niagara Geopark is successful, which it looks very much like it will be, this will be one of the highlights of it. So my advice, of course, would be—before it gets too popular—to go to this location. Because if the Geopark is successful and if it does bring the number of visitors that we expect that it will, Wainfleet will potentially become very busy.

In a more practical sense things that you should consider when coming here: There is a parking lot, but it’s small, so go early, if you’re planning to go. Particularly if it’s gonna be a really nice day. One thing to consider, is that Wainfleet is very open to the elements. So if you’re planning to spend a couple of hours there looking for fossils—which you easily could—make sure you have sunscreen, a good hat or something.

And to that point I should also mention that fossil collecting at this location is not allowed without a permit. So if you’re going to go there, I would encourage you to take photographs and you can take your own 3D models if you have an iPad with Lidar capabilities, and you can do sketches, and drawings, and whatever else you want—but we ask that you leave the fossils where they are. They don’t have any obvious monetary value so there’s no reason to take them and try to sell them or anything like that. Their primary function is educational. This is more of a public educational, public good. And so we ask people to keep their eyes open—of course, like I said, if you see something really interesting, take photos of it and send them to us or send them to the Royal Ontario Museum and they’re happy to look at them and discuss it with you.

But again, we ask that you leave it in place even if you think it’s brand new and unique. If it is, there are procedures for which to remove it correctly and make sure that it gets the proper documentation and everything for it to end up in the museum. But the good news is, if you do discover something new and it is so amazing that it ends up in a place like the Royal Ontario Museum, your name will be associated with the discovery forevermore. So you’ll have that as an amazing story to tell people.

Veronica

There you go, that’s awesome. Alright! So is there anything I missed about Wainfleet that you would want to mention?

Dan

Not particularly, I would just say to people, you know, it’s hard to imagine kind of what it looks like without going there. The GeoHike is doing its best to capture the wonder of the place, but it is truly something else. Like if you’ve hiked in other parts of Ontario and come across fossils usually what you’ve come across are going to be fragmented crinoids right? So crinoids are these little echinoderms that were very common in the past. They still exist today, but they’re quite rare now. And they leave behind these little fossils that look like Cheerios. And you’ll see like thousands and thousands of these Cheerio fossils in parts of the Bruce Trail, for example. And you might think that that’s what most fossil sites look like.

But this is nothing like that. This looks like an ecosystem where the water was just drained out of it, right? Like it feels alive and it will really help you understand just how different the world used to be. That is fundamentally the main thing that makes paleontology interesting, is it just shows you that the world has changed so much and it will blow your mind.

Veronica

Great. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. If you guys want to hear more from Daniel, he’s also featured on our TikTok account. The TikTok account is GeoscienceINFO, and Dan’s got a feature series going called Fossils with Dan. So feel free to check that out if you want to learn more, to hear more from him.

And of course, check out our website at GeoscienceINFO.com, where you can see all kinds of other GeoHikes. And eventually the Wainfleet GeoHike will be published there soon as well. So yeah, thanks so much for joining me, Dan!

Dan

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[musical interlude]

Veronica

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator and geology enthusiast. As a reminder, please note that the opinions and views expressed by our guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the APGO Education Foundation. If you want to learn more, visit us at GeoscienceINFO.com, where you can find our GeoHikes, podcast transcripts and additional resources. You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at GeoscienceINFO or on LinkedIn and Facebook at APGO Education Foundation. Stay curious and keep exploring the incredible world beneath your feet.

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