DINOSAURS, ROCKS, MINERALS AND MORE: Hands-On Science at the Pacific Museum of Earth at UBC, Vancouver, Canada

Amethyst crystals and Lambeosurus skeleton, Pacific Museum of Earth, UBC, Vancouver, Canada.

How do dinosaur fossils, rocks and minerals, petrified wood, climate and weather help us learn about the history of the Earth? The place to go to find out is the Pacific Museum of Earth in the Earth and Oceanic Science building at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

This small museum is filled with kid-friendly (and adult-friendly too) interactive exhibits—from touchable dinosaur bones and giant crystals, a 3-D “map” you can manipulate to change its contours, a machine that spins a tiny tornado, to a green screen that allows you to be your own weather forecaster and more. In an adjacent building you can find more fossils and a history of human evolution.

Dromaeosaurus albertensus

I visited the Pacific Museum of Earth in July when I spent several days in Vancouver. I discovered it by accident on a  walk across the UBC campus. When I spotted the dinosaur skeletons displayed in the main lobby of the Earth Sciences building, I couldn't resist going inside to find out more. 

A touch screen provided an introduction and questions to ask: From there signs pointed me to the next building (EOS) and the Pacific Museum of Earth.

Petrified redwood, 40-50 million years old. Collected and donated by Dr. P. B. Read.

Throughout the museum signs invite visitors to touch or to explore.

Kids recreating the landscape in this 3-D map display.

I saw kids intrigued by an exhibit about mapping and how contour lines indicate elevation. A large tray (similar to a sandbox) filled with granules could be rearranged to make a 3-D landscape. As the elevations changed, colored lights projected from above change to correspond with the new contours.

Solar system display in the gem room.

Gems.

In another room a variety of gems are displayed in lighted boxes, almost as if in a jewelry shop. Below each window a pull-out drawer contains information about the gems. In the center of the room hangs a large orb representing the solar system. Using the screen below, you can change its appearance--making it into the planet of your choice.

The Lytton Jelly Roll.

An amazing example of how rocks can "fold" fills one wall.

Femur (leg bone) of a hypacrosaur.

The museum is clearly designed to appeal to school age kids, showing them how cool earth science can be. Who knows, perhaps some of them will grow up to be earth scientists themselves one day.

A green screen a computer camera has turned me into a weather reporter.

SCOTLAND GEOLOGY; The Northwest Highlands, Guest Post by Paige Arnold

View of Sango Bay, Scotland.

With many thanks to my granddaughter Paige, a student at Amherst College, for sharing her photos of her trip to Scotland in June and her breadth of knowledge of Scotland's geology. 

During my second semester of this past school year, I took a geology field trip class where we learned all about the geologic history of Scotland. This class culminated in a week-long trip to the NorthwestHighlands of Scotland, during which we traveled around to different sites of geologic interest and had the opportunity to see the rocks we had been learning about all semester. Here are some pictures from the trip!

This bridge gave us a great view of some old lake terraces in Achnascheen! Each step you see on the sloping edge of the hill in the center represents the bottom of an ancient glacial lake, with the upper steps being the earlier lake bottoms which were then cut down through by increased meltwater supply to create the next step.

A horse near our hostel in Torridon with Loch Torridon in the background. Loch Torridon is a sea loch, meaning it’s connected to the ocean, so where the water met the land varied a lot over the course of our stay–I believe this picture was taken at high tide.

View of Slioch mountain halfway up Beinn Eighe.

Another view from the Beinn Eighe hike where you can see the paleogeography of an old landscape preserved in the mountain. The slight upward curve about halfway up this mountain represents the upper boundary of the Lewisian Gneiss, which would have been the land surface until it was filled in by the Torridonian Sandstone (above the line) starting around 950 million years ago!

The holes in this rock give the rock its colloquial name “pipe rock”. They are remnants of old worm burrows in sand that has since been lithified into quartzite. These worms would have been alive and forming these burrows in the early Cambrian, around 520-510 million years ago.

Both sides of the Moine Thrust, with the Moine Schist on top of the Durness Limestone. The Moine Schist is older than the Durness limestone, but it’s been thrust up to lay on top of the limestone by tectonic movement. This kind of stratigraphic inversion is only possible via tectonic movement, and Scotland is where thrust faulting was originally discovered!

View from our hostel at sunset.

A chunk of Lewisian gneiss at Achmelvich Beach. There isn’t much to say about this picture but the clarity of the banding is pretty awesome.

Some sheep we saw from the van. I’d say we saw about half as many sheep as people.

Clachtoll Beach! It looks tropical but I promise it was just as cold as you’d expect the North Atlantic to be.

These stromatolites are some of the oldest life on Earth that is preserved in the rock record, dating to around 1.2 billion years old. Stromatolites are a kind of algal mat that accumulate in the wet season and dry out in the dry season, trapping sediment and forming these wiggly lines.

This large black stripe is a Scourie Dyke, it’s about 2 feet across and is intruding into the body of rock around it. Around 2.4 billion years ago, the body of rock around the dyke was split by tectonic activity, allowing hot magma to push up into it and solidify into this stripe.

My friend in the distance at the Arnaboll Thrust.

My friend and I touching both sides of the Arnaboll Thrust! Here the Lewisian Gneiss has been thrust upon the Cambrian Quartzite, which we can be at peace with now but is something that caused a lot of problems among geologists of the 19th century. This thrust fault caused SirCharles Lapworth (eminent geologist of the time) to have an intense mental breakdown due to visions of the entire Scottish Highlands crushing his body, as thrust faulting hadn’t been discovered up until this point and it was just all too much for him to handle. Luckily I was well prepared and was able to enjoy the rocks without descending into madness.

On our last day we “saw” some puffins (these pictures were taken by my friend with a good camera–I only saw more than a black speck once he shared his photos with us) from the cliffs of Faraid Head, which I think was a pretty solid wrap up to the week!

I hope you’ve enjoyed these rocks and maybe feel inspired to take a trip to the Northwest Highlands! I can’t promise it’ll be as sunny as it was in these photos but it’s worth it nonetheless.

SPECTACULAR RED ROCKS OF SOUTHERN UTAH: Expeditions from St. George/Ivins, Guest Post by Matt Arnold

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.

I thank my son Matt for his gorgeous photos and his contribution to The Intrepid Tourist about his family trip to southern Utah in June 2024. He writes:

Over the last few years, I have made several trips to St. George, Utah, as a chaperone for my daughter's swim team, to the beautiful pool at Dixie State University (now Utah Tech University). Impressed by the remarkable scenery and grandeur of the red rocks of Southern Utah, I endeavored to return for non-swim purposes.  This summer we returned as a family and stayed in Ivins, Utah (essentially a suburb of St. George), using it as a jumping off spot for day trips in southern Utah.  

Zion National Park.

St. George markets itself as the "gateway to Zion" and it is certainly an easy ~1 hour drive to the Zion National Park entryway.  St. George is also close enough for day trips to both Bryce National Park and the Grand Canyon, each about 2.5 hours away (northwest, and southwest respectively.)  Even closer is a hidden gem of a state park called Snow Canyon, that is equally impressive and not as impacted and with multiple small hikes to choose from.  

Zion NP. Checkerboard Mesa.

Just driving through Southern Utah, the surrounding scenery and vistas are awe inspiring. If you travel as we did via Las Vegas, as you leave the lights behind driving toward St. George, you are met by the starkness of the Nevada desert, with Joshua trees dotting the landscape.  This ends abruptly as you reach a fracture in the mountains and I-15 freeway plunges into the Virgin River Gorge and into the bottom geologic layer of what is called the grand staircase- and ascend up through various striations and "steps" measuring millions of years of geologic epochs starting with the chocolate layer of Kaibab limestone (which I believe also forms the top rim of the Grand Canyon as well.)  

Snow Canyon State Park. Jenny's Canyon hike.

From there you can eventually step up and ascend through further strata to the Navajo sandstone of Zion and then the Claron formation of Bryce-- spanning from ~225 to 50 million years ago.   All in all, geology is what makes southern Utah tick, from red rocks, to sandstone mesas, to slot canyons, to the various angles of fractures and faults or blobs of rock sticking up from the landscape.

Snow Canyon. Lava flow hike.

To explore the geology, over the course of a week, we started locally with several small hikes at Snow Canyon State Park, within walking distance of our rented home in Ivins.  We followed this with a day trip to Zion National Park and hiked the Narrows (the path is the Virgin river) and would recommend renting a walking stick (at Zion entrance) and bring good shoes you don't mind getting wet (old running shoes worked fine.)  

Zion NP. Narrows hike.

Zion has many other impressive hikes we will have to go back for.   There is a bus system in Zion Valley, cut by the upper reaches of the Virgin river, where no cars are allowed.   It takes about an hour to make it up the canyon and again an hour to get back (you can hop on or off at various stops), with great views of the canyon the whole time.  Another day was a trip to Bryce (2.5 hour drive), for a walk among the hoodoos, making a big loop so as to drive back through the West side of Zion via Route 9 to see Checkerboard Mesa among other impressive formations.

Dinosaur footprint.

While we were on a geology roll, we decided to check out both the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Center- a small museum housing a impressively large set of dinosaur footprints discovered by a local alfalfa farmer while clearing a field. This is a small but impressive little outing. Though not affiliated with the museum, within a 15 minute drive is a site where there are dinosaur footprints "in the wild" with a small trail called the Dino Cliffs Dinosaur tracks, which takes a bit of internet searching and slight off-road/dirt road car adventuring to get to, but was also a short fun little outing.

Bryce Canyon. Near Sunset/Sunrise Point.

The St. George area, besides hosting a large university, is itself an adventure and vacation destination.  The area is surrounded by housing and condo developments that have popped up on fairly recent (geologically speaking) lava beds, which in contrast to the red rock of much of the landscape, reminds me of the Big Island of Hawaii (both for the condo's and the lava fields). The area is surrounded by mountain bike trails, hiking trails, camping and miles of paved roads and trails for biking. In some ways the community is a desert version of Lake Tahoe, or Bend Oregon, marketing itself to those seeking active vacation and outdoor recreation time.   

Zion NP. Checkerboard Mesa.

The one thing we didn't quite account for was the heat in early June.  It was well over 100 degrees much of our visit during the day in St. George. Spring, fall or even winter may be better for some of the more athletic outdoor pursuits (though timing hikes in the morning or evening worked well- and several trips were made to the pool at our housing complex).  Both Zion and Bryce are at higher elevations, so our trips on these days helped take down the temperature a notch at higher elevations (Zion ~4000-5000, and Bryce 6000 feet above sea level.).  

Snow Canyon State Park.

As in much of the west, Southern Utah is full of landscapes that seem endless, and you can't help but feel that there is so much that is left to be explored.  There are additional parks, monuments, trails, and wilderness areas that invite a return at some point in the future.  

Zion NP. Narrows hike.