Fossils, by their very nature, are ancient, unmoving, and, one might be forgiven for thinking, rather dull. I arrived at the Joggins Fossil Centre secretly braced to be bored witless, a dubious participant in a family excursion.
Not 10 minutes later, I was on my hands and knees peering into a display case set in the floor full of rock marked with tiny fossilized footprints of the first reptile. I was covered in goose bumps, exclaiming “No way. Really?” in ever louder tones.
It turns out that fossils – at least, the Joggins Fossils – have been dramatically undersold. Which may explain why the Joggins centre has, in typical Canadian fashion, won greater acclaim abroad than it has at home, and remains one of the country's great travel secrets.
The red shale and sandstone cliffs of Joggins hold entire huge fossilized trees. They hold long, elegant fronds of fern, frozen in rock; they hold horseshoe crabs forever preserved in an act of awkward love. They hold fossilized raindrops and dragonflies. Here, in the middle of pastoral Nova Scotia farmland, are rocks that hold the 300-million-year-old footprints of the first creature to leave the water and make a life on land.
Some time back, my family and I chanced to meet Jenna Boon, the director of the Joggins Fossil Institute. In the course of telling us about her work, she told my dinosaur-obsessed three-year-old, who already liked to boast about his imaginary career in paleontology, “Come to Joggins, and you will find a fossil on the beach – I promise, you'll find one yourself.”
And I thought: Nice one, lady. Now he's going to demand that we go to Joggins and he's going to be heartbroken when he doesn't find a fossil. He's 3! He can't find a fossil!
Little did I know.
Not 10 minutes after we arrived on the beach below the cliffs, he found a fossil. An amazing, intricate piece of 300-million-year-old tree, rough dotted bark on the outside, nubbly tubing system to carry water on the inside, a fossil that the centre happily added to its collection.
Visitors participating in a guided tour of the cliffs. — Joggins Fossil Institute
And whatever delusions of paleontological grandeur my son may have, his discovery was not unusual: I asked Melissa Grey, the centre's paleontologist-in-residence, about her favourite fossil, and she showed me a scaly crustacean preserved in rock, which was found by a seven-year-old visitor. “I just think this one is so exciting,” she said, beaming down on the critter curled in stone, “and I love that a kid found it.”
Joggins, which is today a tiny town on the Bay of Fundy, was, an epoch or two back, located on the equator, just about the time that the first fish grew feet. A lucky confluence of factors causes the fossils here to be astonishingly well-preserved: Back in the Coal Age, the environment was oxygen-rich and thick with vegetation; there were frequent floods of silty soil that buried those plants and attendant creatures. Then the burden of sediment caused the land to sink and then tilt, which exposed the rock layers to the tides and eroded the fossils into visibility.
The fossils were largely unnoticed in the 30-metre cliffs until the 1850s, when they were accidentally discovered in the hunt for coal to fuel the industrial revolution. Sir William Dawson, the founder of modern geology, and Sir Charles Lyell noticed first the upright fossil trees, and then, when they dynamited those out of the cliff wall, found tetrapods (amphibians and reptiles) entombed inside the trees. At Joggins, Dawson found the remains of the first reptile, Hylonomus lyelli, ancestor of the dinosaurs whose era on Earth would come 100 million years later. The discoveries at Joggins were quickly seized upon by Charles Darwin, who wrote about Joggins, and other early proponents of evolution.
Dendrerpeton acadianum, one of the finds at Joggins.
Joggins became a major coal centre, and a key destination for a handful of paleontologists, but its fossils were just a curiosity for locals such as Jenna Boon, who grew up in a farmhouse on the cliffs and used to ride her horse down the trail that now leads from the interpretive centre to the beach. She and other local kids used to charge $20 to the stray tourists who turned up in Joggins – she promised them they would find a fossil too.
