Miguasha National Park
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
In 1842 Abraham Gesner, a physician and New Brunswick's first provincial geologist, found the first fossils in the Miguasha cliffs while looking for coal. With no coal to be had, the site was neglected for more than 30 years. From 1879 to 1881 the Geological Survey of Canada sent expeditions led by Robert Wheelock Ells, joined by the palaeontologist Arthur Foord.
In 1881 Joseph Whiteaves named a fossil fish Eusthenopteron foordi after Foord. The cliffs expose the Escuminac Formation, laid down about 370 million years ago in the Late Devonian, which holds five of the six major groups of Devonian fish. Its lobe-finned fish, the group from which the first four-legged land vertebrates arose, stand out for their number and preservation.
In 1937 René Bureau of the Quebec mines service assembled the first Miguasha collection for the province. Quebec acquired the land in 1970 and created the park on 6 February 1985. A 1998 survey counted more than 14,200 fossils from the cliff, about 8,000 of them held by 33 museums and universities in nine countries. The park was inscribed in 1999.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).