excerpt from the quintessentially Canadian narrative poem "David" by Earle Birney (1904-1995) about mountains, friendship and tragedy set amid the Paleozoic peaks of the Rockies

Singer and songwriter Stan Rogers captured the essential aspect of Canadian landscapes. Whether sea-slicked Newfoundland cliffs, glacier polished Shield outcrops, bleached Alberta badlands, or precipitous Coast Range crags, the land consists of rocks. And if the rocks are not evident at the surface, their presence can be sensed close underfoot.

Not only do rocks shape the Canadian landscape, they comprise the evidence for the earliest history of the land. If human history is recorded by documents, diaries, photographs, tools, artefacts, and inscriptions, then the substance and passage of earth history is gauged by the order of rock strata and by the records of life preserved in the stony archives of the earth -- literally the bones of the earth -- fossils.

Fossils are preserved in sedimentary rocks in every corner of Canada. Their discovery. excavation and retrieval invariably involves fieldwork in an often inhospitable land. In 1844, William Logan, the Director of the newly minted Geological Survey of Canada, described his fieldwork on the Gaspé Peninsula in a letter to Sir Henry de la Beche, his counterpart at the British Geological Survey,

"I worked like a slave all summer on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, living the life of a savage, inhabiting an open tent, sleeping on the beach in a blanket sack with my feet to the fire, seldom taking my clothes off, eating salt pork and ship's biscuit, occasionally tormented by mosquitos. I dialled [with a measuring wheel] the whole of the coast surveyed, and counted my paces from morning to night for three months. My field-book is a curiosity."

Here, we offer a melange of Canadian fossils and the people who discovered or studied them. Both the persons and the fossils are mixed lots. The fossils include algae, plants, corals, trilobites, termites, fishes, ammonites and mammoths. They include dinosaur bones, dinosaur eggs and dinosaur dumps, as well as fossils true, fossils fake and fossils dubious. The discoverers are paleontologists and geologists, of course, but also surveyors, clerks, fur traders, physicists, physicians, carpenters, miners, students, lawyers and farmers, plus native hunters and travellers.

As a prospectus for some of the chapters that follow:

In the summer of 1967 Shiva Balak Misra, newly arrived from India to study for a master's degree in geology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, made a remarkable fossil discovery at Mistaken Point near Cape Race -- imprints of unique spindle-shaped and feather-like impressions of Ediacaran organisms, 570 million years old.

In 1791 the apprentice surveyor Peter Fidler made the earliest recorded observation of Canadian fossils -- "petrified cockles and muscles" -- in limestones on the Clearwater River south of Lake Athabasca.

In 1953 Stanley Tyler, a geologist from the University of Wisconsin, prepared a thin-section of a jet black rock he had picked up at Schreiber, Ontario and discovered the first diverse Precambrian microbiota anywhere.

In 1886 carpenters building Mount Stephen House for the CPR found abundant complete Middle Cambrian trilobites above Field -- a necessary prelude to the nearby discovery of the Burgess Shale some twenty years later.

In 1996 John Bell, a bulldozer operator moving blasted Cretaceous sandstone near Duke Point on Vancouver Island, saved the largest fossil leaf ever found in Canada from destruction.

In the winter of 1811 David Thompson, who had looked in vain for mammoth bones and tusks throughout the west for more than a dozen years, faced the prospect of meeting a living mammoth in a pass through the Rockies.