Joggins Fossil Cliffs
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How it came to be
Joggins lies on the Cumberland Basin at the head of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. The Mi'kmaq called the place Chegoggins, the place of the large fish weir, and Acadian settlers were already digging the coal seams exposed along the shore in 1686. In the 19th century it grew into a large mining town, and its mines closed shortly after the Springhill mining disaster of 1958.
The tides cut back the cliffs every day and expose new Carboniferous fossils. Geologists came from the late 1820s, and Charles Lyell visited in 1842 and 1852; in 1852 he and the Nova Scotian geologist William Dawson found tetrapod fossils entombed inside an upright fossil tree. Dawson later found Hylonomus lyelli, an animal 20 to 25 cm long, described it in 1860 and named it after his teacher Lyell; in 2002 it was made the provincial fossil of Nova Scotia.
The property covers 14.7 km of sea cliffs, rock platforms and beach, 689 hectares in all. It holds the world's thickest and most complete record of Pennsylvanian strata, from about 318 to 303 million years ago, with 96 genera and 148 species of fossils and 20 footprint groups from three ecosystems: an estuarine bay, a floodplain rainforest and a fire-prone forested plain. It was inscribed in 2008.
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