C.W. Gross is the 2021 Historian in Residence

Calgary’s Story did not begin in 1884 when it was incorporated as a city, or 1874 when the Northwest Mounted Police founded Fort Calgary, or the thousands of years during which Indigenous people knew this place as “Elbow”: Moh-kíns-tsis among the Nitsitapii (Blackfoot), and later Kootsisáw among the Tsuut’ina and Wincheesh-pah among the Iyarhe Nakoda (Stoney Nakoda).

Calgary’s prehiStory began 4.6 billion years ago, when a young planet emerged out of the primordial ring of asteroids, comets, and dust surrounding a newly-formed star. Over its history, Calgary has been a tropical coral sea, a swampy coast teeming with dinosaurs, and a frigid glacial wasteland. Each of these eras have shaped the landscape we know today and our connection to it.

This is the premise underlying Calgary’s prehiStory, my final exhibition project as Historian in Residence for Heritage Calgary and the Calgary Public Library, on now in the Calgary’s Story section of the Central Library. But there is also a story underlying the creation of Calgary’s prehiStory!

An exhibit outlining major periods of Calgary’s ancient past and how those have shaped our culture, economy, and even architecture today would not have been possible without engagement with people and organizations in our community. One of those was the Alberta Palaeontological Society. Founded in 1986, the APS is a non-profit group of vocational and avocational palaeontologists, geologists, and fossil collectors who, in normal years, hold regular monthly meetings, summer field trips, an annual symposium, and regular voluntary laboratory work sessions. The APS graciously loaned many fossil specimens from its society collection and public outreach collection, as did members of the society from their own personal collections.

For example, the “Age of Dinosaurs” and “Hell’s Aquarium” sections come almost entirely from the APS collections, supplemented with a few fossils and a lot of dinosaur toys of my own.

These sections outline a period of time in Calgary’s past around 80 to 75 million years ago, when our city was situated in the middle of a coastal bayou. To the east was an inland sea that stretched from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south and from the Red Deer River in the west to the Red River in the east.

In this inland sea, called the “Bearpaw Sea” or “Hell’s Aquarium,” ammonites and fish darted from the rapacious jaws of flying pterosaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs, and terrifying mosasaurs. One of the most terrifying of these was Tylosaurus, represented by the figure in this section. A Tylosaurus found in Manitoba, nicknamed “Bruce,” was 13m or 43ft long from stem to stern. One of their major prey items were ammonites, the cousins of the modern chambered nautilus. Ammonites’ variety of coiled, straight, and ridged shells are seen in the exhibit. The shells of ammonites, recrystallized into a red and green and blue and purple iridescence, furnish the gemstone Ammolite.

On land, if it could be called that, crocodiles, hard and soft-shelled turtles, frogs, a type of crocodile-like reptile called champsosaurs, and dinosaurs thrived beneath verdant swampy foliage. There is a certain poetry about the specimens I was able to obtain for the exhibit. While giant skeletons and perfect skulls are attractive museum pieces, they don’t reflect what the average fossil collector finds while out hiking the Alberta badlands. Far more common are these smaller, fragmentary pieces that better showcase the diversity of Alberta’s ecosystem at the end of the age of dinosaurs. A few isolated teeth from Albertosaurus, the smaller, sleeker, earlier cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex… A horn core from a ceratopsian dinosaur related to Triceratops… The toe bone from an ostrich-like Ornithomimus… A piece of a jaw from a duck-billed hadrosaur with only a handful of the hundreds of teeth that would have been in its mouth to grind up swampy plants… And the various bits of turtle shell, crocodile armour plates, and other species that shared the world with dinosaurs. Information on Alberta’s fossil collecting law is included in the exhibit.

It isn’t just fossils that tell stories about Calgary’s prehiStory. On one rainy day, my wife and I took a field trip to the Crowsnest Pass to collect from the only outcrop of volcanic rock in Southern Alberta. The Crowsnest Volcanics are the remains of 700oC pyroclastic flows, floods of mud and rock called “lahars,” explosive blobs of lava, and falls of ash from a 100-million-year-old volcanic eruption in the vicinity of Cranbrook, BC. The resulting rocks are rich in the minerals analcime, melanite (a type of garnet), sanidine (a type of feldspar), aegerine-augite, and chlorite.  Over time, the same titanic geologic forces that push North America toward Asia and raised the Rocky Mountains also thrust the Crowsnest Volcanics into Alberta.

 That said, exhibits are an ongoing process, even after they debuted. That first visit to the Crowsnest Volcanics site failed to yield the “holy grail.” The analcime-rich igneous rock Blairmorite, named for the town of Blairmore, is known only from the Crowsnest Volcanics and a site in Mozambique. A beautifully cut and polished specimen of Blairmorite can be seen in the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre. About a week after installing the exhibit, my wife and I got away for a much-needed break in the Crowsnest Pass and Waterton Lakes area. And, of course, with it being much nicer weather we stopped by the site again. This time, we found the Blairmorite that can be seen in Calgary’s prehiStory now. It also gave me an opportunity to fine-tune some of the labelling after getting feedback from friends whose knowledge of volcanic rocks is more in depth than my own.

But it wasn’t only important to me to tell geological and palaeontological stories, but cultural ones. As the first peoples in Alberta, the Nitsitapii (Blackfoot) were also the first people to find fossils here. These fossils in turn took on spiritual significance in their connection with the landscape and the other animate beings of land, sky, and water. Invaluable guidance was provided by Elder Adrian Wolfleg of Siksika.

Another cultural story is Calgary’s connection with the sandstone bedrock immediately under our feet. This is a subject I’ve blogged on several times before and will blog on again several more times in the future! I like saving things – as one would expect of an historian and fossil collector – and one thing I was able to save was a sandstone brick from a demolished historic building in Victoria Park. I had heretofore been using it as an interpretive tool about Calgary’s sandstone history when teaching virtual school programs, and I’m gratified to see it put to use in this exhibit… From a demolished derelict in a vacant lot downtown to a place of honour in a display case in the Central Library!

The largest piece in the exhibit is also a rescue. As most readers undoubtedly know, the Glenbow Museum is undergoing an extensive renovation project encompassing every aspect of the organization, from staffing to collections to the building itself. It might be strange to think of it in that way, but museums and their exhibits can themselves take on a history. The historic 1903 Banff Park Museum National Historic Site in Banff National Park is preserved as a “museum of a museum.” One of my favourite museums in the world is the Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie compare in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, France. Its collections are unparalleled, but more than that is its virtually unchanged 19th century presentation. It is virtually unheard-of in Canada to see a classical museum with wrought iron and polished wooden cases.

Tucked away in the Glenbow’s Oil and Gas gallery was a very significant piece: a life-size diorama of Alberta’s 375-million-year-old coral reefs. Rather than see it lost in one way or another, the Glenbow and its Production Department was extraordinarily gracious in allowing me to recover it for this exhibition. But it also required close to three straight weeks of work to fix it up, trim it down, and fit it into a case for display in the library!

The Devonian Reef showcases a life-size and life-like replica of the species that teemed Alberta’s ancient continental shelf. At the time, Alberta was hugging the equator and under warm, shallow tropical seas. Though some of the fish and ammonites in this diorama are based on species from as far away as Scotland, Ontario, and Illinois, most of what you see can be found as close as the front ranges of the Rockies. Clam-like brachiopods and flower-like crinoids are very common fossils. Yet brachiopods are unrelated to clams and crinoids are unrelated to flowers. Crinoids are, in fact, animals related to sea urchins and starfish. They fix themselves to coral reefs by their “stems” and use their “petal” arms to pull food from the water to a mouth in the middle of their bodies. And I use the present tense because crinoids still exist!

Alberta’s ancient coral reefs also supplied our wealth in fossil fuels. Contrary to urban mythology, oil does not come from dinosaurs. Instead, it is the millions of years of accumulated organic material from prehistoric oceans. As they die, the remains of algae, plankton, bacteria, coral, and other marine organisms settled to the bottom of Alberta’s seabed. Over geologic time, these remains were buried and squished. At just the right pressure and temperature, millions of years of compressed organic material changes into petroleum and natural gas. From their deep cauldrons, oil and gas trickle up through pores in the rock until they are stopped by an impermeable layer. Oil and natural gas are not found in cavernous underground lakes, but in holes and channels running through layers of rock. Ancient reefs have a lot of holes in them, making them excellent “reservoir” rocks.

Alberta’s oil and gas economy began in 1914 when the Dingman No. 1 well struck oil in Turner Valley’s 359-323 year old Mississippian rocks. Production of oil and natural gas in Turner Valley continued until the end of World War II. Then oil was struck again in 1947. The Leduc No. 1 well drilled into a Devonian reef outside of Edmonton, finding 317,000 barrels of oil and 323 million cubic feet of natural gas. The Harvie family were owners of the land and became millionaires overnight. Their wealth in turn funded hundreds of philanthropic projects across Calgary and Canada, including the Glenbow Museum and Devonian Gardens.

I could go on, but at the end of the day, I am extraordinarily grateful to Heritage Calgary and the Calgary Public Library for allowing me to serve as Historian in Residence for 2021. The opportunity to research, speak, and create an exhibit on our ancient prehistory and how it has shaped our way of life today has been incredible. It was an absolute pleasure to put all this together, and I hope you also enjoyed the work I’ve done over the past six months. Please do take the time to visit Calgary’s prehiStory on the 4th floor of the Central Library!

C.W. (Cory) Gross is a professional educator with over 20 years of experience in museums and heritage. His primary field is the geology of Western Canada and its intersection with Indigenous, settler, and immigrant histories. In early 2020 he published his first book, The Ice Age in Western Canada.

The Historian in Residence is presented in partnership with Calgary Public Library.