Well, well, well. The invitation finally arrived.
After 350 million years in the making, Joggins has joined the party (fashionably late).
The UNESCO party, that is—the one on July 7, 2008, which officially welcomed these fossilized sea cliffs in Nova Scotia to the highly coveted list of 878 World Heritage Sites. While various roadblocks—like building a $9-million interpretive centre (opened April 2008) and some steep competition from duckbills to Byzantine castles—kept this cliff face in a state of limbo for 10 years, all that extra time had its advantages.
“Time was, no doubt, a benefit,” admits Melanie Cookson-Carter, operations coordinator for the Joggins Fossil Cliffs near the town of Joggins, about 30 km (19 mi) from Amherst, NS. “We didn’t rush our research and it gave us time to build a visitor’s centre (Atlantic Canada’s most eco-friendly building, now up for a LEED gold certificate) on an old coal mine whose grass roof resembles the angle of the mine’s shaft as well as the cliffs’ face.”
Pick through the fog on a guided Joggins Fossil Cliffs tour during the summer and see what the world’s highest tides can do to a face of rock they’ve licked and scraped twice a day—since long before dinosaurs lumbered about. Nestled in its wrinkles are fossilized tree trunks up to six-m (20-ft) high, oddly twisted fish, dragonflies, ferns and the remains of the world’s oldest reptiles (Hylonous Lyelli), the earliest known reproductive life on land.
Dubbed the “Coal Age Galapagos,” this is the planet’s richest roundup of terrestrial-life fossils from the iconic Coal Age. For nearly 200 years, scientists have poked around this 15-km (9-mi) stretch of cliffs at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where tides continually gnaw away at stone, exposing fossils. The site even garnered a plug in Charles Darwin’s landmark work, On the Origin of Species.
But the promotion that really put Joggins on the map was UNESCO’s announcement.
“It was phenomenal,” confesses Cookson-Carter. “We went from hosting 80 visitors a day to 350, and that’s been day in, day out, all summer long.”
List it. And they will come.
www.pc.gc.ca/apps/cp-nr/release_e.asp?id=1220&andor1=nr
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1285
www.jogginsfossilcliffs.net
www.novascotia.com
Canada is home to 15 UNESCO World Heritage Sites:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump
Historic District of Old Québec
L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site
Old Town Lunenberg
Rideau Canal
SGang Gwaay
Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks
Dinosaur Provincial Park
Gros Morne National Park
Joggins Fossil Cliffs
Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay Tatshenshini-Alsek
Miguasha National Park
Nahanni National Park
Waterton Glacier International Peace Park
Wood Buffalo National Park
