Marianne Wong, Geological Survey of Canada
I LOVE a good mystery. Let me tell you about the mysterious case of Monica Meding’s fossil collection and the hunt to locate the specimens.
I was fairly new to the survey, having previously worked extensively on the fossil collections at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Jim Haggart came across a bachelor’s degree thesis written by Monica Meding, who had attended UBC in the 1960’s. Monica’s thesis focused on the Oyster River area of Vancouver Island. She had collected a number of fossils, and Jim wanted to examine the specimens.
My first course of action was to take a thorough look through the UBC fossil collection. This was a bit tricky because COVID had closed the Beaty Museum where the collection is housed. With Jim’s clout and connections, I was able to get back into the UBC collection and investigate. After many hours of searching, however, I found only one fossil in the UBC collection from Oyster River, but this specimen clearly was not associated with Monica Meding’s collection.
Disappointed, but not discouraged, I took the investigation up a notch. We didn’t know what had happened to Monica. Was she still alive?
I was able to find out that Monica Meding had grown up in Campbell River and attended UBC where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Geology in 1964. Monica was the first female to hold a Bachelor of Geology degree from UBC. She had to be granted special permission to become a member of the faculty of science and, in order to remain in the faculty, she had to achieve a certain minimum grade point average. Which she certainly did! Monica was also the first female to attend the UBC field camp, which was then held in the Okanagan Valley.
After Monica left UBC, her trail went cold until the 1980’s, where her name appeared in an oil and gas industry journal as a member of one of the geological associations in Alberta connected with the industry. I knew it was a long shot, but given her age, apparent work history, and a few other factors, I decided to see if Monica’s number was listed in one of the Alberta telephone directories. I struck gold in the Calgary listing. There it was – M. Meding and a telephone number!
Now, one deal that Jim and I had struck up at the beginning of this investigation was that if I was able to track down Monica, Jim would be the person to make the phone call. Which he did!
Can you imagine Monica’s surprise when she heard Jim describe how he came upon her thesis and was interested in locating her fossil collection in order to include it in his Vancouver Island fossil research? They had a great conversation about geology and paleontology and Monica’s time in the profession. Monica also recalled working for the GSC one summer in Ottawa. She was so happy to hear that her work was still given scientific value after 60 years!
Since the fossils were not in Vancouver, we deduced they were likely in Ottawa. A search of the Ottawa database confirmed our suspicion. The fossils were shipped from Ottawa to our Vancouver office, where they have been studied and will be referred to in an upcoming paper published by Dr. Haggart.