Rockglen

R ockglen is situated in the Wood Mountain Uplands. Because this area was not affected by the last glacial movement, our fossils are often not buried by tons of overburden. Over the years these hills have yielded trilobites from 425 million years ago and brontosaurus skeletons from 100 million years ago. A giant sea turtle from 63 millon years past has been excavated in the Killdeer area, and many fossils of prehistoric mammals including the three-toed horse, squirrels, mice, rabbits, weasels and shrews from 15 millon years ago have been unearthed just a couple of miles west of town. P etrified wood are readily found, the largest being a four by thirty foot tree which was unearthed a few miles east of Fife Lake Village. Imprints of tropical plants and other plant fossils may be found between layers of sandstone and in the lignite coal seams in our area. I t was only after the last period of glaciation some 18,000 year ago that mankind showed up in Saskatchewan as evidenced by a stone spearhead, estimated at 10,000 years old, found near Mortlach a few miles north of here. The Aboriginal people have left a rich heritage of stone-age culture in our area, with scrapers, stone hammers, grinding tools, teepee rings and arrow heads to be readily found throughout the district. Some of these relics may be seen at the Tourism Information Station. Geology is the study of rocks and soil. Aside from farmers, the first people who really needed to understand the geological relationships between different rock types were miners. They eventually realized that rocks developed or were laid down in layers (or strata) and that the oldest rocks were there first and are in the deepest layer. Besides this, they learned that natural geological processes were fairly uniform in frequency and size throughout time, allowing them to recognize rock pattern successions, or geologic periods. Over the years, divisions of geologic time have been described. The largest time units are called Eons, consisting of the Precambrian Eon and Phanerozoic Eon. The geology of Saskatchewan conveniently displays rock from both, with the entire northern third of the province being part of the Canadian Precambrian Shield. We assume that during the Precambrian Eon algae, fungi and single-celled creatures developed, as few fossils exist. In the southern two thirds of the Province the Precambrian rock is covered with flat lying sedimentary rocks that have been deposited in what is known as the Phanerozoic Basin. The Phanerozoic Eon represents the time during which the majority of visible organisms – at least those with shells and skeletons -- lived. It covers the last 543 million years of time and has been divided into three Eras; the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era and the Cenozoic Era, from oldest to youngest. (“Paleo” meaning ancient, “Meso” meaning middle and “Cen” meaning recent) while the “zoic” part comes from the root word “zoo”, which means animal. The Paleozoic Era has been called the “age of fishes”, the Mesozoic Era – “the age of Dinosaurs” and the Cenozoic “the age of mammals” although there is considerable overlapping of species between them, i.e. some ancient forms live even today. The Cenozoic (most recent) Era is divided into the Tertiary Period and the Quaternary Period. The Cenozoic Era consists mostly of the Tertiary Period, from 65 million to 1.8 million years ago. The Quaternary Period is from 1.8 million years ago until today and is divided into two Epochs: the Pleistocene Epoch, or age of glaciation, and the Holocene Epoch, which is the last 10,000 year post-glacial epoch in which we live. Having escaped glaciation, the geology of the Rockglen Region encompasses a treasure trove of artifacts from the late Tertiary Period through the entire Quaternary Period, containing potential mining sites for coal, bentonite, kaolinitic and ceramic clays. In the past, placer gold had been found here near Fife Lake and Kimberlite and Garnet indicate possible Diam