These coastal cliffs, a little-visited Unesco World Heritage Site, are dubbed the “coal age Galápagos” for their fossils of plants and animals from some of the first creatures to walk on land more than 300 million years ago.
Jen Rose Smith“Almost every rock you pick up has fossils that are 75 million years older than the dinosaurs,” said tour guide Brian Hebert, owner of Fundy Treasures, which offers guided fossil-spotting tours of the cliffs and beach, timed to the low-tide window when the fossilised forest is most accessible. Hebert spent his childhood scouring the beach for finds and has been guiding tourists along these cliffs since he was just 12. In 2023, his contributions to science earned him the world’s most prestigious award for amateur palaeontologists. In the nearby museum, I’d spotted a fossilised scorpion – the only one ever discovered at Joggins. The tag read “B Hebert, collector”.
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I met Hebert by the fire station in the map-dot town of Joggins and followed him to a deserted beach where 30m-tall cliffs crash into the Bay of Fundy. The cliffs’ tilting bands of red, grey and black stretched out of sight in both directions. Below, the beach was strewn with stone rubble, which the cliffs extrude as they erode.
“It was a completely different world than we’re used to,” said Hebert, pointing to vertical stone columns frozen into the cliffs – the trunks of 40m trees that once shared swampy, ancient forests with reptiles and giant flying insects. Once I learned the fossils’ telltale outlines, I began to spot them everywhere. At my feet, a rock imprinted with a tree’s diamond-patterned bark. Nearby was a fossilised fern, its delicate symmetry instantly recognisable.
