Fossils collected at an SFU construction site in the 1960s are the subject of a recent research paper that reveals palms once grew where Burnaby Mountain stands now.
Picture a time before Simon Fraser University was built on top of Burnaby Mountain – before Burnaby Mountain was even a thing and powerful geological forces had yet to thrust the North Shore Mountains into existence.
Construction at the fledgling university had uncovered a dark seam of shale sandwiched between the lighter sandstone and gravel that makes up most of the mountain’s bulk. Over the 50 years that followed, Mathewes built a distinguished career as a paleobotanist, specializing in microscopic fossils of prehistoric seeds and spores.He returned to SFU in 1975 after a PhD at UBC and a post-doctoral fellowship at Cambridge University.“I knew what they were,” he said. “No one else would know, but I never unlocked the cabinet again because I was working on other things.”
Conifers would come to dominate the area much later before loggers cut them down at the turn of the 20th Century and then again in the 1940s, but Mathewes said he found no evidence of them among the SFU fossils.
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