If you see Don Sharpe, Vice President of Operations for Holiday Trail Resorts, the company that owns Dinosaur Trail RV Resort this summer, there is a good chance that he still may be grinning from ear to ear.
    After all, how often do you get to go to Korea and see your daughter win Olympic Gold?
    Don’s daughter is Cassie Sharpe. The 25-year-old freestyle skier won gold in the women’s halfpipe competition.
        “We were right up at the front,” chuckles Don, who just arrived home to Vancouver Island on Monday. “We were back two or three rows, but people just kept pushing us forward, so eventually we were in the front row.”
    This was Cassie’s first Olympics and a contingent of about 10 went to cheer her on. Don said she was on her game.
        “She laid down the run of her life, and any one of her runs in the qualifier or in the final could have won her a medal,” he said.
    The Sharpe family grew up on Vancouver Island so the kids cut their teeth skiing Mount Washington.  Cassie’s younger brother Darcy also competes at the same caliber in snowboarding but missed the Olympic team by one spot. So come the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, there may be two Sharpes competing.

photo courtesy Jean Levac / Postmedia

The March 1 session of the 2018 Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology’s Speaker Series is a presentation by Dr. Rowan Martindale, University of Texas, entitled “Mass Extinction, Oceanic Anoxia, and Major Paleoenvironmental Changes in the Early Jurassic: New Data from Ya Ha Tinda, Alberta, Canada.”

There were only three Early Jurassic Konservat Lagerstätten known in the world until an incredible diversity of fossil marine life was discovered at the Parks Canada Ya Ha Tinda Ranch. A Konservat Lagerstätte is a deposit of exceptionally preserved fossils where soft body parts are fossilized. The Ya Ha Tinda site is the first marine Konservat-Lagerstätte described from the Jurassic Period in North America.

The Early Jurassic was an extremely stressful time for marine communities. Dr. Martindale’s research at the Ya Ha Tinda site gives us new insights into the diversity, ecology, and biogeography of marine communities during a time of significant biological and environmental change.

In her presentation, Dr. Martindale will discuss the exceptional fossils at the Ya Ha Tinda site and the fossil record of community collapse during the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event, a major global extinction. An anoxic event refers to times in the deep past when parts of the Earth’s oceans were depleted of oxygen—devastating marine communities.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Speaker Series talks are free and open to the public. Presentations are held every Thursday until April 26 at 11:00 a.m. in the Museum auditorium. Speaker Series talks are also available on the Museum’s YouTube channel: youtube.com/c/RoyalTyrrellMuseumofPalaeontology.