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| With hard hats standing in front of (and among fragments of) fossils at the Joggins Fossil Cliffs |
Three hundred million years ago,
landmasses were moving together to form what is now known as Pangea, one big
continent. Then later, pieces of Pangea
would drift off forming the continents that we know today. During the formation of Pangea, the Nova
Scotia coastline of the Bay of Fundy became attached to what is now Morroco,
and was located at the equator. As the
landmasses bumped into each other to form Pangea, horizontal segments of rock on
the Nova Scotia Fundy shoreline moved and bent upward under the pressure
forming hills and mountains.
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| Pressure during the formation of Pangea pushed this horizontal rock strata at Parrsboro to vertical, and bent it. |
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| The rock strata at Joggins is all tilted. Different layers have eroded at different rates. |
These rocks have become eroded
over time as the Fundy tides have worn them away, and fossils of a bygone time
have been exposed. We started our fossil
tours at the Fundy Geological Museum, in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. Canada’s oldest dinosaur fossil was found in
Parrsboro.
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| Dinosaur tracks on the side of a cliff. The textured look is from cracked, dried mud turned to stone. |
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| The bumpy thing in the upper left of the rock is a "cast" of a footprint. The footprint was left in the mud, and the silt that filled it in turned to stone, making a reverse copy of the footprint. |
It was a glorious, sunny day when
we went on a fossil beach walk with the Fundy Geological folks. We found a lot of trace fossils, fossilized
dried and cracked mud, fossils of the ridges that water left in the sand, and
(drum roll please) footprints of small dinosaurs. The footprints were on the side of a
cliff. A dinosaur walked across some
mud, and those footprints were eventually frozen in stone. Pressure from the continents moving together forced
that bit of stone up. We found bits of
fossils in rocks strewn along the beach.
After our guide described to us what we were seeing in the rock, she put the rock
back down on the beach. It would be
covered with water at the next high tide.
It is illegal to collect fossils in Nova Scotia without a special
permit.
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| The cliff is eroding, revealing this tree trunk at Joggins. |
The nearby Joggins Fossil Cliffs
provide a remarkable portrait of what life was like during the Carboniferous
Age, when coal was formed, the before the time of the dinosaurs. Mostly plants lived at that time with
insects, some amphibians and an early reptile.
Because they were at the equator and it was warm and humid, the plants
grew to be very tall. After they died, many
of them remained standing and they were covered by layers of sand and silt, and
became fossilized where they stood. They
are literally standing in the stone on the side of the cliff. Since the stone was subsequently bent upward,
the trees are tilted sideways. In some
cases, scientists have found the remains of insects and other creatures in what
would have been the hollow trunks of what were (at that time) dead trees. All of these are known as in situ fossils and the information
around the fossils as well as the fossils themselves tell important stories of
that time.
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| A stem of a plant |
We visited Joggins on a rainy
day. As we started our tour, a rain
squall, complete with hail, started as well.
Within 10 minutes of the 2 hour tour we were all drenched to the
skin. Hail rattled off the hard hats we were wearing. We wandered along the beach
looking up at the cliffs at the trees fossilized there. We found many fossils of bark and tree roots
in the rocks along the beach. As in
Parrsboro, specimens were placed back on the beach after they were examined and
discussed. It was a bit disconcerting
that put the huge root that we found back down on the sand. To us it was a momentous find, to Joggins it
is just one of many, many tree roots. Someone
in our group found a fossil of tiny footprints. Since there were not many animals then, to
find footprints is very special. Joggins
is a UNESCO World Heritage site which requires that the site be kept as natural
as possible to allow future generations to discover fossils there.
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| "Our" tree root. The dimples are what is left of the "hairs" put out by roots. |
As a quick note, after the
drenching tour, we retired to the motor home, changed clothes and heated up a
pot of soup. Then, warm and dry inside
and out, we returned to the museum to finish our way through it.
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| Can you see the tiny footprint just over the guides index finger clutching the rock? |
It was an unexpected delight to
find fossils in Nova Scotia, especially since they are millions of years apart in
age. As the folks in Joggins say, “They
are a bit younger over in Parrsboro (at 200 million years old) than we are here
at Joggins.” Heh, heh! A little fossil humor.
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| Ferns fossils |
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