Freezing Woman 8 - Timeless Stories with Natalia Rybczynski
We are delighted to introduce our second keynote speaker for Freezing Woman 8.
Natalia Rybczynski is a paleobiologist and Research Associate with the Canadian Museum of Nature, and she's joining us as a keynote speaker for Freezing Woman 8.
Her work centers on Cenozoic High Arctic paleobiology, piecing together what ancient Arctic ecosystems looked like from fossil remains preserved in permafrost. She's an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University and her research is part of PoLAR-FIT, a research network that investigates the biology, climate and landscape evolution of the Pliocene (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) Arctic.
In 2013, Rybczynski announced one of her best-known finds. Fossil fragments collected over several field seasons on Ellesmere Island turned out to belong to a High Arctic camel, about 3.5 million years old! It pushed the known range of camels 1,200 kilometres further north than anyone expected, and suggested that traits like the hump and wide feet may have been adaptive in Arctic forests, and are not just associated with deserts. The discovery was featured in a TED talk by Latif Nasser and a Radiolab "Terrestrials" episode. A few years earlier, on Devon Island, she led an expedition that found something just as significant: Puijila darwini, a 20 to 24 million year old "walking seal" that fills in a missing link between land carnivores and modern seals, published in Nature in 2009. Last fall, at that same Devon Island site, her research contributed to another new discovery: a High Arctic rhino, Epiaceratherium itjilik. Itjilik means "frosty" in Inuktitut.
Rybczynski's fieldwork, and her life since a skiing accident in 2011, are the subject of “Frozen in Time”, a CBC The Nature of Things documentary that premiered in November 2025. She still lives with the effects of the concussion, and her research today happens at a different pace than it once did. It isn't a story of full recovery. It's an ongoing one.
Rybczynski has a simple motto in the field: "Pick up everything." Sometimes a find may appear insignificant until the evidence adds up. It took her team multiple field seasons and thirty bone fragments before a partial leg bone was recognized as evidence of the camel at all.
The keynotes at Freezing Woman 8 take place on Saturday, November 21, 2026 at noon, at the Algonquin Park Visitor Centre. You'll want a Ripples and Leaves Membership to ensure you don't miss out. Members are seated before the general public.
