Monday, July 7, 2014

Joggins Fossil Cliffs

We took a little side trip to visit Joggins Fossil Cliffs a UNESCO world heritage site.

It is a trove of fossils from the Carboniferous Period about 300 millions years ago.

Our arrival was timed pretty good, we had enough time to make a quick lunch in the trailers before taking a tour.

You can wander around yourself but you don't learn as much and with fossils can sometimes miss them entirely.
At Joggins it would be hard NOT to find a fossil as they are everywhere all over the beach and the cliffs.

Check out this tree trunk in the cliff wall.
 The tour guide is giving us a lot of good information and the tour group is finding the fossils.

She explained one great thing about Joggins is how the erosion of the cliffs if exposing new fossils all the time.

Even these ripples are a fossil of where waves disturbed the mud and somehow it got fossilized.
 The tree trunks are really cool. And entirely different from other fossilized and petrified trees we've seen before.
 Tucker even joined in the search for fossils.
 It was a bit of a dreary day but the cliffs were still beautiful.

I forget the exact number but as the layers in the cliff go it was about 4000 years of time per foot.
The entire fossil encrusted exposure is over 9 miles long. We only explored about a mile of it.

 Really large tree trunk about 3 feet in diameter.

There is also still a lot of scientific studies going on at the cliffs.





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