Royal Ontario Museum

Safeguarding history: U of T researchers team up with Royal Ontario Museum to preserve ancient Greek coins

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 17:05:32 +0000

Safeguarding history: U of T researchers team up with Royal Ontario Museum to preserve ancient Greek coins

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 01/10/2024 - 12:05

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PhD candidates Maria Stanko (right) and Dian (Jack) Yu study images generated by energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Post-doctoral researcher Michel Haché looks on in the background (photo by Aaron Demeter)

Rebecca Cheung

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Our Community

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Arts & Science

Graduate Students

Humanities

Royal Ontario Museum

U of T Scarborough

Subheadline

Researchers are examining the chemical composition on the surfaces of ancient coins to advise museum conservators on how to treat and store them.

Researchers at the University of Toronto's Open Centre for the Characterization of Advanced Materials (OCCAM) are working with the conservation team at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) to help preserve links to the past, ensuring important historical artifacts can be studied and shared with generations to come.

Maria Stanko, a PhD candidate in the department of materials science and engineering in the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Engineering, and her collaborators are studying the surfaces of two corroded Greek coins from the Hellenistic period – dating back to 300-115 BCE – using OCCAM’s instrumentation.

By understanding what is happening to these priceless relics, the team will be equipped to advise researchers and conservators on how to best conserve and store these artifacts safely.

The coins are subjects of study for the ROMkomma project, a collaboration funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and led by Kate Cooper, an assistant professor, teaching stream in the department of historical and cultural studies at U of T Scarborough and research associate at the ROM, and Ben Akrigg, associate professor in the department of classics at the Faculty of Arts & Science.

The project aims to catalogue and publish data on the museum’s extensive collection of more than 2,000 ancient Greek coins. This investigation, which will make the ROM’s Greek coin collection accessible online, could reveal important insights on early minting practices and how early economies were developed.

Students and researchers from the department of materials science and engineering developed a plan to position and mount ancient Greek coins so they could be imaged and analyzed (photo by Aaron Demeter)

“Environmental degradation is normal with coins that are thousands of years old,” says Stanko. “On a few of these coins, we’re likely seeing corrosion caused by elements like chlorine and bromine.

“These corrosive products are harder than the coin itself. We risk damaging the artifacts and removing the fine surface detailing if we try mechanical cleaning methods.”

The coin imaging and analysis project began as an assignment for the Analytical Electron Microscopy course Stanko took with Janet Howe, an associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering and the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry and Stanko’s PhD co-supervisor.

Stanko and collaborators, including Howe, PhD candidate Dian (Jack) Yu and post-doctoral fellow Michel Haché, developed a strategy to examine the coins with a scanning electron microscope paired with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDS).

“Once we know more about the chemical composition on the surfaces of these coins, we can advise ROM conservators on non-destructive treatment strategies and storage solutions,” Stanko says.

The project has proven to be challenging. Since EDS works by exciting the electrons on the surface of a sample to emit X-ray signatures, the team needed to fix the position of the coins – without the use of clamps or guides that might cause damage – for the signals to hit the detector in just the right way.

One of the ancient Greek coins being analyzed at OCCAM is seen on the top left (photo: Laura Lipcsei, Royal Ontario Museum). The top-right photo shows a zoomed-in view of a section of the coin showing a corrosive product. SEM-EDS maps of the section of coin (bottom left and right) suggest the corrosion product is silver chloride (supplied image)

This type of analysis works best for smooth and flat objects, so the team spent hours examining the uneven faces of these coins under an optical microscope to identify specific areas where the samples could be imaged and analyzed.

Laura Lipcsei, a senior conservator at the ROM, says the museum is grateful to be able to work with OCCAM researchers. “We are so lucky to have this amazing resource available to us. It’s not just about having access to state-of-the-art technology and tools, this is an excellent team to work with,” says Lipcsei. “They are sharing important information, and we couldn’t do our work without them.”

The ROMkomma project is just one of many currently underway at the centre right now.

“OCCAM is the infrastructure supporting research across U of T and beyond,” says Howe, the newly appointed co-director of OCCAM, who played a leading role in installing the equipment at the centre.

“Many branches of science and engineering rely on understanding the structure of materials at atomic and nano scales, whether it’s related to designing catalysts for green energy, developing new biomolecules in medicine or enhancing microchips in our smartphones. Our work benefits every researcher tackling today’s grand challenges.”

Howe is looking forward to an upcoming collaboration with Hitachi High-Tech, involving a low-cost structural analysis tool that could significantly bring down the cost of characterizing the structure of new materials.

She identifies the centre’s focus on teaching as one of its core strengths.

“At OCCAM, we don’t restrict access to our world-class instrumentation to post-doctoral fellows and senior researchers. Undergraduate and graduate student get hands-on experience and are encouraged to come to us with projects.”

U of T researchers help study, catalogue ROM's ancient Greek coins

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 17:14:14 +0000

U of T researchers help study, catalogue ROM's ancient Greek coins

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 10/19/2023 - 13:14

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An Athenian coin, circa 454-404 BCE, with the head of Athena and an owl near an olive branch (photos by Laura Lipcsei © Royal Ontario Museum)

Sean McNeely

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Classics

Faculty of Arts & Science

History

Humanities

Royal Ontario Museum

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“No two coins are exactly alike – they’re unique little works of art”

Did you know the change rattling in your pocket is similar to coins used in ancient Greece?

In fact, the current design of our quarters, loonies and toonies is almost identical to those used more than 2,000 years ago – an insight the University of Toronto’s Ben Akrigg is keen to share with a wider audience.

An associate professor in the department of classics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Akrigg is working with a team of scholars and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) to study, catalogue and publish information on more than 2,000 ancient Greek coins through the ROMkomma project.

“Greek coinage is so interesting because it’s almost the earliest coinage – at least in the Western tradition of coinage,” Akrigg says. “The idea is to make sure that our high-resolution photographs and up-to-date identification, dating and commentary are available on the museum’s website for anyone who wants to look at them.”

A Seleukid Empire coin (circa 155/4 BCE) with the head of King Demetrios and Tyche: the personification of fortune or luck.

The ROMkomma project – komma means “impression of a coin” in ancient Greek – launched last year and is supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Akrigg works alongside Boris Chrubasik, an associate professor and chair of the department of historical studies at U of T Mississauga; Kate Cooper, an assistant professor, teaching stream, in the department of historical and cultural studies at U of T Scarborough; as well as a team of graduate students.

Ben Akrigg (photo supplied)

The first phase of the project, which wraps up in 2024, focuses on about 250 coins from two regions of ancient Greece: the city of Athens (sixth to first centuries BCE) and the cities of the Hellenistic empire of the Seleukid rulers (fourth to first centuries BCE).

Akrigg and his team are providing information such as the weight, size and dimensions of each coin, an approximate date it was minted, what the markings mean and other relevant information about its use and significance in ancient Greek history.

While the bulk of the updated information is housed in a database for ROM internal use only, there is a small database available to general public.

“To some extent, we can trace changes in the economies and the day-to-day lives and day-to-day uses of money in Greek cities by seeing what kinds of coins they're minting,” Akrigg says.

To update the database, the team had to first refer to the original files from the ROM – some of which were decades old – and put their research talents to good use.

“My favorite part was looking for ‘mystery coins,’” says Anastasia Zabalueva, a PhD student in the department of classics.

“Some old printed pictures of coins had incorrect inventory numbers or did not have a number at all – so we had to identify the right number so that we could match the picture and the page of coin in the database.”

Zabalueva and her colleagues also searched filing cabinets and other source materials to ensure the descriptions were accurate, sometimes comparing and matching descriptions with those from other international ancient coin collections.

“We felt like detectives solving a mystery,” she says.

Most of the coins are made from silver and all were made by hand. First, a blank coin was heated to become softer and placed on a die containing the design on the one side – the obverse or “heads” side. Then another die containing the design of the other side – the reverse or “tails” side – was placed on top and was struck by a hammer, creating a two-sided coin in a single blow.

A Greek coin (circa 125-124 BCE) with the head of Athena and an owl standing on an amphora – a type of Greek vase.

One group of coins the team is studying is from ancient Athens, one of the earliest Greek cities to create its own coinage in the middle of the sixth century BCE.

“If you look at the Athenian coins, what's striking is that they’re instantly recognizable as coins, monetary instruments like ours – and partly because, in many ways, they resemble the coins we have in our pocket,” Akrigg says.

On the “heads” side, many of these coins have a profile image of Athena – the goddess of wisdom and war, and the city’s protector. The other side of the coins display symbols associated with Athena such as an owl or an olive branch.

“The owl is a symbol of wisdom associated with the goddess, though owls have other meanings as well,” says Akrigg.

A coin from the Hellenistic period (circa 300-295 BCE) with the head of a young Herakles and Zeus sitting on a throne holding an eagle.

Later coins from the Seleukid Empire often placed rulers on the face of the coin – especially Alexander the Great, with the image of a god such as Zeus or Apollo on the reverse, as well as a variety of creatures such as turtles, lions, elephants.

“At the end of the fourth century BCE, some of Alexander’s successor kings put Alexander's portrait on their coins, but then after a while, the kings thought, ‘Hang on, why don't we just put ourselves on?’” says Akrigg. “And so coins became a way to assert their own legitimacy as kings in their new kingdoms.”

For Zabalueva, the ROMkomma project is more than the analysis of ancient artifacts and identifying whose face is on what coin – it’s a journey into cultural history.

“Each kingdom depicted on their coins represents something very important for the community: it might be a god or goddess, an animal, a ruler, an abstract symbol,” she says.

“It's much more than just a means of exchange. It's a display of local culture, history, power and state propaganda all at the same time.”

That tradition remains relatively unchanged. Most Canadian coins have a portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II on one side – and for our loonies, quarters and nickels, a loon, a caribou and a beaver, respectively, on the opposite side.

Though ROMkomma is a massive project that will ultimately take years to complete, Akrigg says he will always get a charge out of seeing the coins first-hand.

“The coins are mass produced but because they're handmade, each one is unique,” he says. “No two coins are exactly alike. They’re unique little works of art.”

Archaeologist looks to ancient solutions to help solve contemporary global problems

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 20:04:06 +0000

Archaeologist looks to ancient solutions to help solve contemporary global problems

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 08/22/2023 - 16:04

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Justin Jennings, the curator of world cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum and an associate professor in U of T’s department of anthropology, explores alternative methods of resolving global issues in his new book, Rethinking Global Governance (photos supplied)

Cynthia Macdonald

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Our Community

Archeology

Faculty of Arts & Science

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“Other societies had political, social and economic ideas that could be very useful as we look at the decades ahead of us”

As the world grapples with cross-border challenges such as climate change, pandemic disease, cybercrime and income inequality, it may be tempting to look to the United Nations and other international organizations for solutions.

Or is it time to change our modern thinking about the best way to address global problems?

Justin Jennings thinks so.

The curator of world cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum, Jennings is an associate professor in the department of anthropology in University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science who has been researching different societies – some of them thousands of years old.

In doing so, he says he has learned a great deal about alternative methods of resolving difficult issues and maintaining order – insights that form part of his new book, Rethinking Global Governance.

“The book is structured to say that global governance could benefit from some of these lessons,” Jennings says. “Other societies had political, social and economic ideas that could be very useful as we look at the decades ahead of us.”

Jennings notes the world has changed significantly since many of the current crop of international organizations were first convened in the 20th century in the wake of two catastrophic world wars. Authoritarianism and nationalism are once again on the rise and trading blocs based on Western ideals did not anticipate the rise of economies in the East – all of which can make international co-operation more difficult.

Yet, Jennings says before the rise of the nation-state people often governed themselves in a more flexible, borderless way.

He says one such society is the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a group of First Nations Peoples in the northeastern region of North America. The Confederacy’s constitution, known as the Great Law of Peace, outlined a detailed, thoughtful process to be used when seeking consensus on important decisions.

In fact, when crafting their own constitution, the founding fathers of the United States were initially curious about incorporating ideas from the Great Law of Peace, Jennings says.

“I quote from John Adams in the book, who said the framers of the constitution could learn a lot from the Haudenosaunee,” he says.

“[But] then they didn’t – because those ideas weren’t in their wheelhouse.”

While Jennings notes that some ancient societies were also hierarchical – ancient Egypt, he says, was a “pyramid society in more ways than one” – he asks whether a more decentralized governance model, where power is more equitably shared, might not be more responsive to our changing times.

“The galactic polities of traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms were often organized around a centre, with different groups in and out of the orbit of that centre. There wasn’t a lot of effort towards creating rigid connections between that centre and other places. Now, is this a good idea? I’m not sure. But it’s a different idea and one that should be explored because putting patches on the big bucket that is the nation-state isn’t proving very effective.”

A council meeting held by the Onondaga, one of the nations of the Haudenosonee Confederacy, is depicted from the 1700s (Illustration by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images)

He says decentralization could be useful when it comes to dealing with climate change since some of the most affected regions are located far from the centres of decision-making.

“Perhaps we can start to build new coalitions of impactful groups and provide them with the capacity to work through solutions that adapt to local conditions,” Jennings says. “Then get funding for them that isn’t tied up in red tape.”

In other parts of the book, Jennings describes ways in which perennial problems were managed in the past. He shows how the Enga people of Papua New Guinea defused warfare and resolved economic inequality through a system known as the “tee cycle,” and how societies such as the Pomo of northern California organized daily life by creating order out of anarchy.

Hippies experimented with anarchy in the 1960s, he adds, “but communes often failed because members weren’t looking at solid examples of communal, collective, egalitarian structures that lasted millennia.”

While Jennings is studying smaller societies, he believes there are nevertheless learnings that could inform global governance.

“Certainly there are scalar elements,” he says. “As a community gets larger it does tend to get more hierarchical, and the decision-making process changes. But this book suggests there may be alternative pathways. Those New Guinea tee cycles, for example, created vast amounts of wealth moving from one side of the country to the other. Thanks to a solid overarching structure, they had a playing field that was much larger than the village where they lived their day-to-day lives. This allowed them to interact with and organize hundreds of thousands of people doing things hundreds of kilometers away.”

As the world changes and our concerns mount, Jennings says rather than rely on ideas that clearly aren’t working, we should look to the past to find new solutions.

“Human history is all about trying to solve problems together,” he says. “We’ve been doing it successfully for many years. Now, as we take on some of the biggest challenges that humans have ever faced, it would be wrong for us not to be looking at other ways that people can come together to solve issues, especially because the context in which some groups used to – and in some cases still continue to – live is in many ways parallel to where our societies are going in this increasingly globalized world.”

Researchers discover the oldest species of swimming jellyfish: CNN

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 19:20:32 +0000

Researchers discover the oldest species of swimming jellyfish: CNN

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 08/08/2023 - 15:20

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An artist’s depiction of Burgessomedusa phasmiformis swimming 505 million years ago in the Cambrian sea, where it was believed to be one of the largest predators (illustration by Christian McCall)

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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research & Innovation

Royal Ontario Museum

Researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the University of Toronto have discovered evidence of the oldest swimming jellyfish in the fossil record, CNN reports.

A study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, documented the finding of 182 fossils in the Burgess Shale, a deposit in B.C.’s Rocky Mountains known for its rich preservation of the explosion of life during the Cambrian period.

Researchers found that the fossils belong to a newly identified species of jellyfish that swam in the Earth’s oceans 505 million years ago, CNN reported. Given that jellyfish are 95 per cent water, it is a remarkable and rare fossil find.

“Although jellyfish and their relatives are thought to be one of the earliest animal groups to have evolved, they have been remarkably hard to pin down in the Cambrian fossil record,” Joe Moysiuk, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, who is based at the ROM, said in a statement quoted by CNN. “This discovery leaves no doubt they were swimming about at that time.”

Co-author Jean-Bernard Caron, an associate professor in ecology and evolutionary biology and the ROM’s Richard Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology, adds that the discovery the new species – called the Burgessomedusa phasmiformis – enriches our understanding of the complexity of Cambrian food webs, noting that these jellyfish were efficient swimming predators.

The discovery was covered by outlets around the world, including the Guardian, CBC News and New Scientist. Visitors can see fossils of Burgessomedusa phasmiformis at the ROM’s Willner Madge Gallery, Dawn of Life.

Massive new animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 19:22:51 +0000

Massive new animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 09/29/2021 - 15:22

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Titanokorys gainesi was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas during the Cambrian period, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger (illustration by Lars Fields/Royal Ontario Museum)

ROM/A&S News Staff

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Royal Ontario Museum

University of Toronto palaeontologists based at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered the remains of a huge new fossil species belonging to an extinct animal group in half-a-billion-year-old Cambrian rocks from Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies.

Named Titanokorys gainesi and described in a study published in Royal Society Open Science earlier this month, the new species is remarkable for its size. With an estimated total length of half a metre, Titanokorys was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time – most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger.

Jean-Bernard Caron sits above a fossil of Titanokorys gainesi at the quarry site located in Kootenay National Park (ohoto by Joe Moysiuk)

“The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling – this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, an associate professor in the departments of Earth sciences and ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T and the Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the ROM.

Evolutionarily speaking, Titanokorys belongs to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodonts. The most iconic representative of this group is the streamlined predator Anomalocaris, which may itself have approached a metre in length. Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple slice-shaped, tooth-lined mouth, a pair of spiny claws below its head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming. Within this group, some species also possessed large, conspicuous head carapaces, with Titanokorys being one of the largest ever known.

“Titanokorys is part of a subgroup of radiodonts, called hurdiids, characterized by an incredibly long head covered by a three-part carapace that took on myriad shapes. The head is so long relative to the body that these animals are really little more than swimming heads,” added Joe Moysiuk, co-author of the study, and a PhD student in EEB based at the ROM.

Jean-Bernard Caron and Joe Moysiuk in the ROM palaeontogy lab room examining Titanokorys gainesi and Cambroraster falcatus (photo by Andrew Gregg/© Red Trillium)

Why some radiodonts evolved such a bewildering array of head carapace shapes and sizes is still poorly understood and was likely driven by a variety of factors, but the broad flattened carapace form in Titanokorys suggests this species was adapted to life near the seafloor.

“These enigmatic animals certainly had a big impact on Cambrian seafloor ecosystems. Their limbs at the front looked like multiple stacked rakes and would have been very efficient at bringing anything they captured in their tiny spines towards the mouth. The huge dorsal carapace might have functioned like a plough,” added Caron, who is Moysiuk’s PhD adviser.

All fossils in the study were collected around Marble Canyon in northern Kootenay National Park by successive ROM expeditions. Discovered less than a decade ago, this area has yielded a great variety of Burgess Shale animals dating back to the Cambrian period, including a smaller, more abundant relative of Titanokorys named Cambroraster falcatus in reference to its Millennium Falcon-shaped head carapace. According to the authors, the two species might have competed for similar bottom-dwelling prey.

These and other Burgess Shale specimens will be showcased in a new gallery at the ROM, the Willner Madge Gallery, Dawn of Life, opening in December 2021.

The Burgess Shale fossil sites are located within Yoho National Park and Kootenay National Park and are managed by Parks Canada. Parks Canada works with leading scientific researchers to expand knowledge and understanding of this key period of earth history and to share these sites with the world through award-winning guided hikes. The Burgess Shale was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 due to its outstanding universal value and is now part of the larger Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.

Support for the research came from a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant to Caron and a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship to Moysiuk. Additional support for the research and fieldwork came from the Polk Milstein Family, the ROM, the National Geographic Society, the Swedish Research Council, the National Science Foundation and Pomona College.

U of T alumna aims to bring the history of Emancipation Day, on Aug. 1, to a wider audience

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 13:32:09 +0000

U of T alumna aims to bring the history of Emancipation Day, on Aug. 1, to a wider audience

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 07/30/2020 - 09:32

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An undated photo of Emancipation Day celebrations in Windsor Ont., which once drew figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and musical acts like the Supremes (photo courtesy E. Andrea Moore Heritage Collection/Essex County Black Historical Research Society)

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Faculty of Information

Museum Studies

Royal Ontario Museum

Before COVID-19 struck, the city of Windsor, Ont. was looking forward to its biggest Emancipation Day celebrations in recent years on Aug. 1. And, thanks to the efforts of local history buffs, it was well on its way to bringing back an event that recalled the days when Windsor attracted famous civil rights activists and Motown stars to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in most of the British colonies in 1834.

The history – and recent revival – of Windsor’s Emancipation Day is being closely followed by Tonya Sutherland, who graduated from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in museum studies this year. Building on research for her 2018 capstone project, Sutherland and two other women from the Toronto area – retired teacher Catherine MacDonald and actor and producer Audra Gray – sought to bring this chapter of Black Canadian history to a wider audience.

In the 1950s and early1960s, hundreds of thousands of people would arrive in Windsor for the multi-day festivities that took place the first weekend in August. They heard from figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt – and watched the Supremes, Stevie Wonder and the Temptations, who crossed the Detroit River to perform at Windsor’s Jackson Park. But by the late 1960s, Windsor’s Emancipation Day festivities had begun to lose steam.

“These celebrations were some of the biggest in North America, but they didn’t remain in people’s consciousness,” says Sutherland. “It’s a bit of a shame how they’ve been mostly forgotten.”

But efforts are underway to make Emancipation Day a big deal again. When Windsor’s Emancipation Day Committee announced it was cancelling this year’s events, it also said it was planning for an significant event in 2021.

In the meantime, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto will mark Emancipation Day with a special ROM Connects talk moderated by Sutherland on Aug. 5, which follows an earlier talk given this month.

Working under the umbrella of the Jackson Park Project, named for the park where the Emancipation Day celebrations were held in Windsor, Sutherland’s goal is to create a digital archive of historical material.

As for Sutherland’s partners in the project, MacDonald is aiming to create educational resources for use in classrooms that would be hosted by the digital archive while Gray wants to produce a drama television series based on the annual festivities as well as a documentary. The documentary would chronicle both the team’s behind-the-scenes journey and a proposal before Parliament to formally recognize Emancipation Day nationally (Ontario officially recognized the day in 2008).

“Audra was watching TV one day and came across this documentary, The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth. It was a larger history of Emancipation Day, somewhat focused on Windsor, but with a broader view,” says Sutherland. “She wondered why she had never heard of it.”

Thinking it a story worth dramatizing, Gray linked up with MacDonald, her former teacher who was also interested in Canada’s Black history. MacDonald’s husband mentioned the project to his co-worker, Sutherland’s father, who in turn told his daughter about it.

“I tend to get really invested in the personal element of history,” says Sutherland who also earned an undergraduate degree in English and history from U of T in 2016. That interest caused her friends to suggest she might want to check out the Faculty of Information’s museum studies program. The idea resonated with Sutherland, who had also been inspired watching the TV program Mysteries at the Museum.

During their first research trip to Windsor in 2018, Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray spent a week researching and filming. Irene Moore Davis, president of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, shared a wealth of information with the visitors. “While we say this is a history that’s not known to a broader audience, people from Windsor – whose families were involved – are very aware,” says Sutherland. “Irene has been really key to our project because she has quite a large collection of family history including boxes of documents. Her family was very involved in Emancipation Day.”

While in Windsor, Sutherland visited the University of Windsor archives, looked at hundreds of photographs and examined the programs printed annually, which typically included a letter from the mayor of Windsor and sometimes featured messages from prominent speakers. “From magazines, you could see who was buying ad space and supporting the celebrations,” she says, adding that the documents helped with her primary research.

Sutherland digitized the materials as part of her capstone project with the goal of creating a permanent digital archive. “I’ve learned all the things that go into creating an archive and a digital archive,” she says. “The more I learn, the more it teaches me what I don’t know.”

That also goes for Black Canadian history, says Sutherland, who adds that Canadians often don’t know what became of the people who arrived in places like Windsor via the Underground Railroad. “Was everything amazing? Did they face racism and struggle?”

The holes in our knowledge “speak to a larger unknowing,” she says. “This whole thing has been extremely eye-opening to me.”

MacDonald says the history of Windsor’s Emancipation Day is a perfect subject for teaching because it is so multi-faceted. “It’s the story of Canada and the Black diaspora. It’s the story of English and French, and the story of Canada and the U.S. It’s the story of two cities.”

Black families were often divided between Detroit and Windsor with cousins walking across the frozen Detroit River in winter and holding large family get-togethers at Emancipation Day events in the summer. A Detroit historian, Kimberly Simmons, has spent more than a decade trying to get the Detroit River declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for the role it played in the underground railroad.

Meanwhile Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray continue to move forward on their Windsor projects. The teaser for Gray’s documentary debuted last summer at Emancipation Day. MacDonald is working with local Black educators, members of Windsor’s Black historical society and the Ontario Black History Society to produce lesson plans. And Sutherland has produced a digital archive feasibility report as her capstone project in museum studies.

In some ways, the work they are doing emulates that done almost a century ago by Windsor citizens. In 1932, they, too, decided that they wanted to build up their small Emancipation Day celebrations into a much bigger event – and eventually turned their vision into reality.

Despite COVID-19, the work behind the scenes on bringing Emancipation Day to a wider audience continues. “We’re now trying to seek out and establish viable and more stable sources of funding,” Sutherland says.

U of T paleontologists find traces of sabre-toothed cat in Medicine Hat

davidlee1 — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 12:41:17 +0000

U of T paleontologists find traces of sabre-toothed cat in Medicine Hat

davidlee1 Fri, 10/04/2019 - 08:41

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U of T PhD student Ashley Reynolds, lead author of the study, holds the Smilodon fatalis metacarpal from Medicine Hat. On the table are a S. fatalis skull and canine tooth from Peru (photo by Danielle Dufault/ROM)

A & S News Staff with files from Royal Ontario Museum

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Breaking Research

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Graduate Students

Research & Innovation

Royal Ontario Museum

New research shows that the fearsome sabre-toothed predator Smilodon fatalis lived in Alberta during the Ice Age, according to scientists at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).

This identification marks the northern-most record of the sabre-toothed cat by about 1,000 kilometres.

A study published Friday in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences documents the first known occurrence of a Smilodon fossil in Canada, based on a stout partial hand bone of one of the cat’s large forepaws. The fossil was identified during a review of collections at the ROM.

The study also documents bone specimens from three other types of cat from Medicine Hat, Alta., including the American lion (Panthera atrox), a lynx or bobcat (Lynx sp.), and what may be the most southerly record of the cave lion (Panthera cf. Panthera spelaea), which was previously only known in North America from fossils found in Alaska and the Yukon.

“Knowing now that Smilodon’s range extended this far north in Canada tells us a lot more about Pleistocene ecosystems and how they changed over time,” said Ashley Reynolds, a PhD student in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T, who is based at the ROM.

Illustration of Smilodon fatalis (Henry Sutherland Sharpe)

“This allows us to learn how plant and animal communities responded to changes in the past, and even how they may respond to human-related changes today and in the future,” Reynolds said.

Supersized cats like Smilodon and the American lion went extinct the same time their prey did, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, around 11,000 years ago.

“These few bones show that at least three large cat species lived in western Canada during the Ice Age” says Kevin Seymour, co-author and assistant curator, vertebrate paleontology, at the ROM.

“This sharply contrasts with today when we have only one large cat in Canada, the mountain lion or cougar, which is smaller than the other big cats that roamed Canada during the Pleistocene.”

The mountain lion’s larger Ice Age cousins, including Smilodon, would have hunted large herbivores that were also present at the time, including camels, horses, giant ground sloths and young mammoths and mastodons, whereas the mountain lion today hunts mainly deer.

“Smilodon is best known from tar pit deposits in California and South America, so it’s both exciting and surprising to find evidence of this iconic sabre-toothed predator in Canada,” says co-author David Evans, an associate professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology and Reynolds's PhD supervisor. Evans is also the James and Louise Temerty Endowed Chair of Vertebrate Paleontology at the ROM.

Reynolds’s interest in the comparative anatomy of big cats has led her to specialize in the study of pre-historic cats for her PhD. “I was looking through the ROM’s collections one day to see what we had and was very surprised to find fossils from Alberta labelled as Smilodon,” she says. “I knew then that we had something really cool.”

Ashley Reynolds holds the Smilodon fatalis metacarpal from Medicine Hat (photo by Danielle Dufault/ROM)

The fossils held at the ROM were collected in the late 1960s by U of T paleontologist C.S. Churcher and colleagues in the area around Medicine Hat. This latest research confirms the species to which the bones belonged to.

This past summer, Evans and Reynolds followed up by leading a team of graduate students to explore the Ice Age deposits and revisit the fossil sites in Medicine Hat.

The iconic Smilodon has captured the public’s imagination in pop culture. Fans of the big cat may know the animal as Diego from the 2002 movie Ice Age, or from the end credits of The Flintstones cartoon that shows Fred unceremoniously putting their sabre-toothed cat, Baby Puss, out of the house every night.

The research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Researchers discover tiny, 500-million-year-old predecessor to scorpions and spiders

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 15:34:23 +0000

Researchers discover tiny, 500-million-year-old predecessor to scorpions and spiders

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 09/12/2019 - 11:34

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Mollisonia plenovenatrix preserved in dorsal view, showing the large eyes, walking legs and the small chelicerae at the front (photo by Jean-Bernard Caron)

Arts & Science news staff

Topic

Breaking Research

Earth Sciences

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Global

Research & Innovation

Royal Ontario Museum

Paleontologists working on the world-renowned Burgess Shale have revealed a new species named Mollisonia plenovenatrix, which they describe as the oldest member of a group of animals called chelicerates. The discovery places the origin of this vast group of animals – over 115,000 species including horseshoe crabs, scorpions and spiders – to a time more than 500 million years ago, near the beginning of the Cambrian Period.

The findings were published this week in Nature.

Mollisonia plenovenatrix would have been a fierce predator – for its size. As big as a thumb, the creature boasted a pair of large egg-shaped eyes and a “multi-tool head” with long walking legs, as well as numerous pairs of limbs that could altogether sense, grasp, crush and chew.

But, most importantly, the new species also had a pair of tiny pincers in front of its mouth, called chelicerae. These appendages give rise to the name chelicerates and are used to kill, hold and, sometimes, cut their prey.

Reconstruction of Mollisonia plenovenatrix (image courtesy of Joanna Liang, Royal Ontario Museum)

“Before this discovery, we couldn’t pinpoint the chelicerae in other Cambrian fossils, although some of them clearly have chelicerate-like characteristics,” says Cédric Aria, lead author of the Nature study and a recent graduate of the PhD program in the University of Toronto’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“This key feature, this ‘coat of arms’ of the chelicerates, was still missing.”

Other features of this fossil, including back limbs likened to gills, further suggest that Mollisonia’s body already resembled those of modern species and was not some primitive version of a chelicerate.

“Chelicerates have what we call either book gills or book lungs,” explains Aria, a member of the Royal Ontario Museum’s Burgess Shale expeditions since 2012 and currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China.

“They are respiratory organs made of many collated thin sheets, like a book. This greatly increases surface area and therefore gas exchange efficiency. Mollisonia had appendages made up with the equivalent of only three of these sheets, which probably evolved from simpler limbs.”

U of T alumnus Cédric Aria at the main Marble Canyon quarry site in Canada’s Kootenay National Park during the summer of 2014 (photo by Jean-Bernard Caron)

Aria and co-author Jean-Bernard Caron, the curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the ROM and an associate professor at U of T’s department of Earth sciences, believe that Mollisonia hunted close to the sea floor – a type of behaviour called benthic predation – thanks to its well-developed walking legs. Because Mollisonia is so modern-looking, chelicerates seem therefore to have prospered quickly, filling in an ecological niche that was otherwise left poorly attended by other arthropods at that time. The authors conclude that the origin of the chelicerates must lie even earlier within the Cambrian, when the heart of the “explosion” really took place.

“Evidence is converging towards picturing the Cambrian explosion as even swifter than what we thought,” says Aria.

“Finding a fossil site like the Burgess Shale at the very beginning of the Cambrian would be like looking into the eye of the cyclone.”

Three U of T faculty appointed members of the Royal Society of Canada’s college for new scholars

perry.king — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 16:31:36 +0000

Three U of T faculty appointed members of the Royal Society of Canada’s college for new scholars

perry.king Tue, 09/10/2019 - 12:31

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From left to right: U of T researchers Jean-Philippe Julien, David Evans and Daniel De Carvalho are being recognized for demonstrating a high level of achievement in their careers to date (all photos by Perry King)

Topic

Ecology & Environmental Biology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Medicine

Hospital for Sick Children

Immunology

Princess Margaret Hospital

Research & Innovation

Royal Ontario Museum

One researcher wants to beat cancer. Another is developing a better malaria vaccine. Yet another is one of Canada’s leading paleontologists.

The three University of Toronto faculty members – Daniel De Carvalho, Jean-Philippe Julien and David Evans – have been named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

The college recognizes up-and-coming researchers who have demonstrated a high level of achievement in their careers to date.

“Daniel De Carvalho, Jean-Philippe Julien and David Evans are leaders in their respective fields who exemplify the important work that takes place at the University of Toronto every day across a wide range of disciplines,” says Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“We’re extremely proud of their admission to the college and look forward to seeing their research make an impact in Canada and beyond. U of T congratulates them for this impressive appointment.”

Established in 2014, the college seeks to recognize and foster academic leadership and collaboration among those who have received their PhD within the last 15 years. The appointment honours excellence and appointees are granted a seven-year membership. Up to 80 members may be elected each year.

Daniel De Carvalho

An associate professor in the department of medical biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine and a senior scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, De Carvalho is being named to the college the same year that he becomes a Canadian citizen.

“It’s a big honour,” says De Carvalho, who joined U of T in 2012. “I feel like it’s a really exciting welcome to Canada. I’m really happy.”

The Brazil-born researcher’s work focuses on epigenetics, or the changes brought on by modification of gene expression, and better understanding the mechanisms behind tumour growth and translating this knowledge into more efficient approaches for therapy.

Some of his research has uncovered possible cancer treatments.

“When we’re thinking about cancer in general, [we’re thinking about] how can we beat cancer – make new therapies and so on,” De Carvalho says.

His lab is focused on early detection since cancers evolve, cell mutations occur within patients and, in some cases, can become metastatic. His team wants to get ahead of such threats.

“If you detect early, it’s much easier to treat. But it’s very difficult to detect. Later on, it’s very easy to detect but it’s very difficult to treat,” says De Carvalho. “We’re trying to break this in a way that can be more useful to the patient.”

The opportunity to work with researchers across multiple disciplines, from immunology to computational biology, helps keep De Carvalho motivated.

“I have to trust and believe everyone here,” he says. “I’m really hands off so it gives space to trainees – post-docs, visiting scientists, PhD students – so they’re all working together.”

As he joins the Royal Society of Canada, De Carvalho wants to spread the idea that curiosity-driven research like his needs broad support.

“We need to figure out ways … to create an ecosystem in Canada where science can move faster from basic science to the clinical side.”

Jean-Philippe Julien

Julien, an assistant professor in the departments of biochemistry and immunology in the Faculty of Medicine and a scientist at the SickKids Research Institute, studies how the immune system works and harnesses that information to design interventions, including vaccines.

In particular, Julien investigates B cells, which produce antibodies that neutralize invading pathogens like bacteria, viruses and parasites.

With a focus on infectious diseases – in recent years, his team has been unpacking the complexities of malaria and HIV – his lab seeks to understand health at an atomic scale.

“We think that if you understand the molecular basis of immune responses, you can intervene more precisely,” says Julien.

His lab, which has recently been leading several research fronts toward the development of a malaria vaccine, partners with numerous collaborators. They include research sites with unique samples from individuals exposed to infectious disease, and from clinical trial sites that offer opportunities for researchers to learn how humans respond to vaccine candidates.

“We learn from the human response as much as we can – natural settings, but also in testing new technologies and interrogating them at the molecular level,” says Julien, who received his PhD from U of T in 2010.

Julien says his membership in the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists is a reflection of his team’s success – not only his own. He also sees it as an opportunity to grow as a thought leader.

“The biggest aspect to it, for me, is the ability to be part of an organization that mentors junior colleagues – not just in science and research but also in leadership and outreach,” he says. “I really look forward to that.”

As for the future, Julien says he’s focused on gaining a better understanding of the molecular basis of disease to guide the development of next-generation biomedical interventions.

David Evans

An associate professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science who oversees dinosaur research at the Royal Ontario Museum, Evans studies the Cretaceous Period to understand Earth’s biodiversity crisis today.

The paleontologist is trying to build the fossil record from that “data-rich” period – the one before the mass extinction event 66 million years ago wiped out over 75 per cent of species on Earth, including all the non-avian dinosaurs.

Speaking at his office at the ROM, Evans says his work focuses on fundamental questions about life on Earth at that time. In turn, the data contributes to ecological models that test the resilience of different organisms to extinction, and ecosystems to collapse.

Such work will help us understand the “causes and consequences of mass extinctions,” Evans says. His work takes into account what makes a robust ecosystem, what species are more likely to survive an extinction event and what happens to ecosystems as a result of habitat destruction and sea level and climate change.

“We have a lot of these particular scenarios that have played out in Earth’s history that we can go back to and study to see what the particular consequences of those types of changes have been on the Earth’s biota through time,” says Evans, who joined the ROM in 2007.

From “boots on the ground” fossil digs to collaborations with global research teams, Evans has personally been involved with the discovery of 11 new dinosaur species in the last six years, including a 76-million-year-old armoured dinosaur in 2017.

But there is still work to be done. Only about 900 dinosaur species have been verified in the 150 million years of recorded dinosaur history, says Evans. That pales in comparison to the number of known bird, mammal and reptile species in the present day.

“That’s what I tell a lot of the up-and-coming young paleontologists that I see here at the museum and around the world – that dinosaur discoveries are not running out anytime soon,” Evans says.

“There will be generations and generations of new discoveries to be made and they can make them. We’re not even close to knowing everything.”

U of T paleontologist David Evans takes the Globe and Mail on a dinosaur dig

perry.king — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 17:03:33 +0000

U of T paleontologist David Evans takes the Globe and Mail on a dinosaur dig

perry.king Mon, 08/19/2019 - 13:03

Cutline

(photo courtesy of David Evans)

Topic

Global Lens

Dinosaurs

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research & Innovation

Royal Ontario Museum

When paleontologist David Evans and his team discovered a triceratops skull in the fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation, the Globe and Mail was right along with them.

Evans, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, walked a reporter through his team’s Hell Creek expedition – a five-year project seeking Late Cretaceous period fossils in the mountainous region of Montana. The expedition by the Royal Ontario Museum, where Evans oversees dinosaur research, seeks to enrich fossil data, but also to better understand the circumstances that precipitated the dinosaurs’ mass extinction – including drastic climate change and forced migration.

“Everybody agrees the asteroid impact is what ultimately led to the extinction of the dinosaurs,” Evans told the Globe and Mail.

“What I’m trying to find out is what type of animals made it through the extinction – what kind of circumstances precipitated an ecosystem collapse of that nature and how fast it took for those ecosystems to recover, so we can understand the consequences of what we’re doing today.

“What we’re doing to the planet is happening so fast, we can’t study it and make projections in real time. And we certainly can’t appreciate the long-term effects of what we’re doing to the planet. The fossil record holds important lessons in that regard.”

Royal Ontario Museum

Safeguarding history: U of T researchers team up with Royal Ontario Museum to preserve ancient Greek coins

U of T researchers help study, catalogue ROM's ancient Greek coins

Archaeologist looks to ancient solutions to help solve contemporary global problems

Researchers discover the oldest species of swimming jellyfish: CNN

Read more about the discovery at CNN

Read more about the discovery at the ROM

Massive new animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale

U of T alumna aims to bring the history of Emancipation Day, on Aug. 1, to a wider audience

U of T paleontologists find traces of sabre-toothed cat in Medicine Hat

Researchers discover tiny, 500-million-year-old predecessor to scorpions and spiders

Three U of T faculty appointed members of the Royal Society of Canada’s college for new scholars

Daniel De Carvalho

Jean-Philippe Julien

David Evans

U of T paleontologist David Evans takes the Globe and Mail on a dinosaur dig

Read more about David Evans in the Globe and Mail