Menu Close

Tag: RBCM

VicPS November Meeting: Tuesday, Nov 14th, 7:30 pm

The November VicPS meeting will be in person and virtual; Zoom participation details have been sent to VicPS members in an email.

For those joining in person, the meeting is:

The Community Room entrance is in the Uptown Shopping Centre parking garage (easy access) on Level 1 (Green).  If you’ve ever parked under WalMart and taken the escalator up, the room is to your right at the top of the escalator. If you’re facing the Walmart entrance (about to enter the store), turn left, and at the top of the escalator, turn left. The room is directly ahead.

VicPS president Jerri Wilkins writes: The meeting topic “will be a pictorial walk through of the RBCM’s current exhibits (Sue the T. Rex and Dinos of BC).  Both exhibits sparked a lot of questions for me about what we find (and don’t find) here on the island.  I’m very curious to hear what you see, as we do a virtual walk-though.”

“We will also have A SHOW AND TELL of specimens from the recent field trip to Boomerang Lake. Thank you, Andrew Fidell, for an enjoyable experience, and the bonus side-trip to Qualicum Beach to take in a public presentation on cephalopods by Graham Beard! That bit of serendipity was absolutely fabulous! I was too engaged to take many photos, but I will talk about it!”

“As usual, anyone in the BCPA family is welcome to join our meeting.”

BCPA family members not in VicPS: send an email to request the Zoom details.

Newly discovered fish species named after Sooke fossil hunter

As reported by Roxanne Egan-Elliott for the Times Colonist, the fossil found by Steve Suntok in 2014 near Sooke has now been classed as a new genus and species, and named for him.

Suntok found the fossil on a beach northwest of Sooke in 2014. He donated it to the Royal B.C. Museum, and a leading world expert on fish fossils studied the specimen in detail. In a scientific paper recently published, Russian scientist Evgeny Popov concluded the fossil was a new genus and species in the Chamaeridae family, which are cartilaginous fishes that have short rounded snouts and long tapered tails.


Popov named the fish Canadodus suntoki — Canadodus for “tooth from Canada” and suntoki for Suntok.

Times Colonist, Sep. 18, 2020

Congrats to Steve Suntok on this honour!

CBC Radio’s On the Island host Gregor Craigie interviewed Steve Suntok and Marji Johns about this fossil discovery. You may listen to that radio clip here.

A press release, with good images, prepared by Popov, Johns and Suntok may be viewed here. The scientific paper itself may be viewed here.

VicPS Meeting May 15

For Wednesday’s meeting, May 15, 2019,  Dr. Ken Marr, Royal BC Museum Curator of Botany, will speak on the topic: New plant discoveries from Northern BC’s Alpine.  

Ken’s presentation will cover images of the landscapes in which he and his Royal BC Museum colleagues have collected rare plants, common plants and a pseudoflower. He’ll also talk about a puzzling gap in the distribution of several species and what we are learning from DNA markers about the migration of several species.

He will provide many images of flowers and some fossils!

See you at 7:30 pm in the Cornett Building, Room A120, UVic.

VicPS Meeting Feb 20

The weather has improved, so we’ll meet Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019. 

Our speaker will be Dr. Joel Gibson, Curator of Entomology, Royal B Museum and the topic:  

Back to the Beach – Anthropocene Insects on the Shores of British Columbia British Columbia has over 25,000 km of coastline from Vancouver Island to Haida Gwaii. This is more than the United Kingdom or India. The coastline includes thousands of islands, rocky shores, sandy beaches, coastal dunes, and tide pools. While BC’s coastline has always been a part of the culture of the people in this region, its unique biodiversity is only starting to be fully documented. Many of you probably know that “Anthropocene” is a proposed geological epoch name and hasn’t yet been approved by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) nor the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS).  The Anthropocene Working Group of the ICS has recommended the name, but we will have to wait and see what happens.

See you at 7:30 pm in the Cornett Building, Room A120, UVic.