“Coal Age” Joggins Fossil Cliffs

The coastal cliffs of Joggins, hewn by the highest tides in the world, expose anew fossil trees of the great tropical forest swamps that gave rise to the coal deposits of Europe and North America (Calder et al., 2006). Visited and studied by Sir Charles Lyell and Sir William Dawson in the Nineteenth Century (Lyell and Dawson, 1853), the cliffs were cited as the best possible exposure of the fossil record by Charles Darwin in his seminal work ‘On the Origin of Species’ (Darwin, 1859).

The standing trees have captured the imagination of scientists and citizen scientists alike because of the fossils contained in their once hollow trunks. These fossils include the earliest reptile and amniote in the fossil record, Hylonomus lyelli (Carroll, 1964). Over 100 individual tetrapods (amphibians and reptiles) have been discovered within the trees of Joggins, historically ascribed to having fallen victim to open pitfalls. More recent analysis suggests that these tetrapods, along with millipedes and the earliest land snails, denned inside the tree hollows (Calder, 2017).

Examples of life in these tropical swamp forests include trackways of one of the largest terrestrial myriapods Arthropleura, scorpions, whip spiders, footprints of tetrapods, aquatic fauna in beds that derive from basinwide flood events, and foliage and stems of the tropical forests themselves.