Tyndall Stone – the Rock Star of Whistler Village -The epic 450 million year saga of Tyndall Stone rocks; from Caribbean Sea to Whistler Village
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
One of the things I love about Whistler Village is how many of the buildings are clad in beautiful and
interesting rocks. A great example is Tyndall Stone which cloaks the lower part of Tyndall Stone Lodge
on the Village Stroll North. This dolomitic limestone is a true “rock star,” undoubtedly the most famous
building rock in Canada adorning many of our most important buildings including the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. It is full of weird and exotic fossils, the skeletal remains of ancient sea creatures and remnants of their muddy burrows. But how did it get here?
Tyndall Stone was formed 450 million years ago when the Earth was quite different from today. Back
then, the North America tectonic plate “Laurentia” was south of the equator, and was covered by a warm shallow tropical sea, similar to the present-day Caribbean. It was a tough place to live and many animals developed hard outer shells for protection, some were pretty wacky and wouldn’t look out of place in an Avatar movie.
There were no fish but lots of predators like squid and octopus, there was also a scary looking marine
animal called a cephalopod encased in a long straight cone-shaped shell, with a beak and tentacles
sticking out the end that could reach up to 3 metres long. Strange-looking trilobites, multi-legged animals with body armour, scurried around feeding on the rich sea floor mud. There were beautiful and colourful reefs made of corals, sponges and algal mounds, including the exotic-looking “sunflower corals.” Elegant “sea lilies” (crinoids), were anchored to the sea floor by slender flexible stems and had feathery arms gently waving in the current. Giant sea snails (gastropods) lived on the sea bed along with bivalves like modern-day clams.
Beneath the surface, shrimp and worms produced massive networks of interconnected burrows into the
sea bed, mining the sediment for food, protected from the dangers above. In the process, they produce
the beautiful distinctive “tapestry texture” we can see in Tindall Stone today.
Over many years, as organisms died, their outer shells accumulated on the sea floor and were buried,
and hardened to form Tyndall Stone. During the next 450 million years the Laurentian plate, including
Manitoba, was forced on a wild 6000 km ride north of the equator by powerful currents in the Earth’s
mantle. During this epic voyage Laurentia smashed into other plates that melted and crumpled. Tyndall
Stone luckily survived largely untouched until it was exposed at the surface a few thousand years ago
after the last Ice Age.
It is likely people of the First Nations would have noticed this distinctive and unusual rock first and may
have named it. Much later, in 1823 Hudson Bay workers came across a Tyndall Stone outcrop near
Selkirk, Manitoba. They recognised its value and soon after the first Tyndall Stone building was erected
at Lower Fort Garry, followed by many important and historic building projects all over Canada. By the
1990’s Tyndall Stone had become ingrained in Canadian cultural identity and was a popular building
stone. So it is not surprising that in 1996 Whistler Village got its very own Tyndall Stone Lodge, a
handsome condo building with an epic story.
If you want to learn more about Tindall Stone here is a good place to start:
Written by Steve Carney
Vertical section through Rugose Coral Crenulites with banding. Photo by Steve Carney
Comments