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Category: Meetings

AGM March 18: Cancelled Due to COVID-19

UPDATE: Like the Fossil Fair, our AGM and monthly meeting has now been cancelled due to the COVID-19 precautions. No plan to reschedule the meeting until things improve health-wise. The AGM may be held online or via email to meet Society Act rules; more news when we know for certain.

There is no field trip scheduled for March. Stay healthy and practice “social distancing”!

Our Fossil Fair has been postponed/cancelled due to COVID-19.

Our AGM is scheduled for March 18 and it is important that we have a good turnout for election of officers. Our meeting numbers and the relatively large classroom in which we meet suggest we may all keep the health-maintaining recommended “social distance” from each other.

Please respond by email to Tom Cockburn regarding whether or not you will attend the meeting.

Following our AGM, our speaker is Grant Keddie, Archaeology Curator, RBCM.  Grant’s topic is to be announced.

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 April 17

Our speaker is Dr. Henry Choong, RBCM Curator of Invertebrates, who will speak on the topic: Hydroid Biodiversity – an overview of hydrozoan diversity at the Royal BC Museum.  He will present an overview of hydroid biodiversity and discuss the challenges of hydrozoan taxonomy.  He will highlight some of his recent work on the biogeography and long-distance dispersal of hydroids.

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

VicPS Meeting March 20

The agenda for the Wednesday, March 20 meeting includes our AGM and election of officers and directors.  We plan to move through this quickly, so we may enjoy the presentation from our speaker.

Our speaker is Dr. Gavin Hanke, Curator of Vertebrates, Royal BC Museum and the topic is Thelodonts – the Forgotten Fish.  Thelodonts are a class of extinct Paleozoic jawless fish with distinctive scales instead of large plates of armor.

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.

VicPS Meeting Jan 16

Dr. Victoria Arbour, the new Curator of Paleontology at the Royal BC Museum, will be our speaker on “Zuul:  An Exceptional Armoured Dinosaur from Montana“.

See you Jan. 16, 2019, 7:30 pm, Room A120, Cornett Building, UVic.

VicPS meeting Nov 21, 2018 7:30 pm

Meeting to be held in Room A120, Cornett Building, UVic.

No formal speaker.

Members are invited to bring in specimens they have collected during field trips this year, including those at the recent symposium. Hopefully, we will be able to help with identifications.

Dr. Joseph Haegert, VicPS member, was presented the Rene Savenye Award for Outstanding Contributions to Paleontology by an Amateur at the 12th BC Paleo Symposium in Courtenay on Aug. 18, 2018. Joe will be at the meeting to receive the Certificates that go with the award. Joe donated his 30,000 specimen collection, mostly Vancouver Island Cretaceous, to the Royal BC Museum. This will be an opportunity to meet one of British Columbia’s most important fossil collectors.

At this meeting, details of the next planned field trip will be announced.

There will be no VicPS meeting in December. Happy Holidays.