NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Principal Investigator: Miyashita, Tetsuto
Licensed Year(s): 2023
Summary: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No. 5549. Through this field project, the hope is to accomplish two goals: 1) to fill in a major gap in, and transform knowledge of early vertebrate evolution through the analysis of new fossils from the Anderson River locality, which represent a poorly known interval of the geological time; and 2) to establish a line of publi...

Principal Investigator: Murton, Julian B
Licensed Year(s): 2022
Summary: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No.5255. The main objective of the project is to establish the causes of the major changes in sulphur isotopes recorded in fossil bones of mammals at the end of the ice age. To achieve this, the research team will test the working hypothesis that major changes in fossil bone collagen sulphur are linked to changing biogeochemic...

Principal Investigator: Terlaky, Viktor
Licensed Year(s): 2019
Summary: The objective is to scope the Imperial Formation in order to develop a more extensive future study of this formation, and to sample the sites for conodont fossil bearing carbonates in order to better age date the Horn River Group deposits. At each site the rock exposure will be photographed in detail. At Mountain River and Gayna Gorge the outcrop will be sampled for conodont fossil bearing car...

Principal Investigator: Pratt, Brian R.
Licensed Year(s): 2019
Summary: Sedimentary rocks of Cambrian age (~500 million years old) are the oldest Phanerozoic strata in the Mackenzie River valley region and record the spread of a shallow sea over much older strata. The approximate age of these rocks is known via trilobite fossils based on reconnaissance collections made in the 1960s and 2010s. The purpose of the project is to make more closely spaced fossil collections...

Principal Investigator: Gosse, John C
Licensed Year(s): 2017 2016
Summary: The objectives of this research are to: 1) collect pieces of wood to measure tree rings and carbon and oxygen isotopes to determine past climate (mainly average summer temperature); 2) collect sand samples to date the layers which contain the wood and evidence of faulting, so the team can date they can be dated to show how old the wood and faults may be; 3) map the faults and tilting of the ...

Principal Investigator: Smith, Martin R
Licensed Year(s): 2016
Summary: The objectives of this research project are to measure continuous sedimentary sections spanning Proterozoic-Phanerozoic transition; to use geochemical approaches to precisely constrain the age and depositional conditions of the strata; and, to obtain Small Carbonaceous Fossils and Small Shelly Fossils from temporally-constrained strata in order to determine the rate of evolution through the Cambri...

Principal Investigator: Dearden, Richard P
Licensed Year(s): 2016
Summary: The research team will visit the site, as specialists in vertebrate palaeontology, in the hope of finding more of these well-preserved cartilaginous fishes. This will hopefully result in more fossil material, which will be collected and taken back to the institutions for study. The work would involve searching for more fossils: this mainly consists of hiking over the rocky exposures above the t...

Principal Investigator: Vavrek, Matthew J
Licensed Year(s): 2013
Summary: This project is a continuation of the collaborative research program on ancient biodiversity in the Canadian Arctic. Recently, the group completed work supported by Polar Continental Shelf Project in the Brackett Basin in the westcentral Northwest Territories and the Bonnet Plume Basin in northeastern the Yukon Territory, during which the research team recovered both new vertebrate (dinosaur) foss...

Principal Investigator: Narbonne, Guy
Licensed Year(s): 2013 2012
Summary: The world’s earliest animals appeared in the Ediacaran Period about 580 million years ago, and soft worm-like animals capable of movement appeared suddenly worldwide 555 million years ago. The previous studies (Narbonne and Aitken, Palaeontology, 1990; MacNaughton and Narbonne, Palaios, 1999; Narbonne, The Rise of Animals, 2007) have shown that these fossils are especially well represented in the ...

Principal Investigator: Gosse, John C
Licensed Year(s): 2013
Summary: The primary objectives are to i) collect fossils (i.e. peat, bone, wood, and other sedimentary proxies) for paleoenvironmental reconstructions and, ii) document the age of the Beaufort Formation (Fm) at Ballast Brook, northwest Banks Island using a new approach based on the exposure of quartz sand grains to cosmic radiation: terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (TCN) burial dating. The cosmogenic nuclid...