Driller finds ancient fern leaf fossil

1 of 3A fully intact fern leaf fossil discovered by Sonic Drilling Ltd. driller Randy Lamb near Tumbler Ridge is estimated to be 80 million years old. — Photo courtesy Sonic Drilling Ltd.

2 of 3The core box with material that came from the same depth as the fern leaf fossil. — Photo courtesy of Randy Lamb

3 of 3The Sonic 450 drill on site at the Peace River Coal mine near Tumbler Ridge where an intact 80 million year old fern leaf fossil was recently discovered. — Photo courtesy of Randy Lamb

Sonic Drilling Ltd. driller Randy Lamb has been drilling for 22 years, and while he said “you always know there’s material in the dirt you’re coring,” he had never seen anything like what he recently unearthed at the Peace River Coal mine near Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

“We were up there basically for the month of February drilling for slope stability because it’s an open pit mine,” said Lamb. “They wanted to see what the cut will have to be for the pit to be safe and how hard the ground is, for reasons like removing it.

“We would touch into coal because they wanted to prove out bedrock, and that’s where the coal was, right on top of the bedrock.
“It’s not something that I’d normally do, but I was basically questioning the geologist because I was worried that he was installing not in the correct area. I thought the material we were in was a tight till and I thought he was going to put the well on top of the bedrock. I grabbed a four-foot piece that could have been just a hard silt, and I broke it and grabbed two pieces and banged them together because I wanted to open it up and see the inside of it, and when it broke there was an impression of a fern there.

“I’ve been drilling for 22 years and I’ve seen a lot of rocks, but it was something interesting besides a rock. It’s not something you would see every day, so it made me feel special. It was definitely interesting to find.”

The engineer on site at the time of Lamb’s discovery estimated the fern fossil to be approximately 80 million years old.
“I hadn’t seen a trophy like mine yet,” said Lamb. “It’s sitting at home on my mantel.”

Paleontologist Lisa Buckley, the Tumbler Ridge Museum Foundation’s Peace Region Paleontology Research Centre curator and collections manager, said that while the area is rich in coal deposits and fossils of Cretaceous plants, the discovery of a fully intact fern fossil is significant.

Buckley said that during the Cretaceous geologic period, the Tumbler Ridge area was a swampy forest and that “coal deposits are remnants of very wet, swampy, very densely vegetated areas.”

“That’s basically what coal is, compressed plant material,” she said. “When you have those environments preserved you get the coal, but the coal doesn’t occur as a single entity. Sandstone and siltstone are interspersed, separating the coal seams in those deposits. That’s where you get the really nice impressions of the same kind of vegetation that formed the coal. You get plants that are sandwiched in between very fine sediment layers that were trapped in a plastic ridge.

“In a very highly vegetated, very swampy area where there’s lots of gingko and ferns and stuff like that you’re going to up the chance of finding something not in coal form, a really nice fossil.”

At the same time, Buckley said that, “even if something that is relatively common in the area, any time you get a well-preserved anything it’s important.”

“If you go through the piles of any coal mining operation you’re going to find partial leaves and partial stems and partials twigs, and that’s just the nature of the way that the deposits are mined, they’re using pretty big equipment,” she said. “Even if you find fossils naturally without using big industrial-sized equipment you’re not guaranteed a nice, perfect, pristine one because nature’s also a really good smasher of fossils.

“Finding something nice and complete is not the norm, it’s the exception to the rule, and the fact that it was found relatively complete, that always excites us. The fact that someone noticed it and was interested enough in it to talk about it and report it is also an equally important part of the picture.”

Buckley said that sometimes there is a misconception that fossils found in industrial operations like a coal mine should be “hushed up” to keep the operation from being shut down, but “that’s not the case at all.”

“Coal mines do millions and millions of dollars worth of exposing these fossil-age sediments that we would otherwise not see,” she said. “They’re actually a source for fossils and a resource for that rather than any sort of hindrance.

“We’re always excited to hear about fossil discoveries that happen in the coal mines.”

In a press release, Sonic Drilling general manager Bill Fitzgerald said “the drillers just arbitrarily picked up a piece of the core sample and found the leaf inside… It was pretty exciting to see something that old.”