Qualla: Joggins

Joggins: Introduction

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cornellier, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every day the Bay of Fundy tides carve a little more from the cliffs at Joggins, and every day something 310 million years old falls onto the beach. Fossils here do not require excavation. The ocean does the digging, prying ancient tree trunks, amphibian bones, and arthropod trackways from Carboniferous coal seams and depositing them on the shore like offerings. Charles Lyell, the founder of modern geology, visited twice and declared Joggins 'the finest example in the world' of Coal Age rocks. Darwin cited it in On the Origin of Species. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2008. The tides, indifferent to honors, keep working.

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Image: Cornellier | CC BY-SA 4.0

Joggins: Chegoggins

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tango7174, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Mi'kmaq called this place Chegoggins -- the place of the large fish weir -- a name that French and English settlers gradually shortened to Joggins. The community sits on the Cumberland Basin, a sub-basin of the Bay of Fundy, where coal seams stripe the sea cliffs like dark li...

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Image: Tango7174 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Joggins: When Nova Scotia Was Tropical

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TravelingOtter from Houston, Texas, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Three hundred and ten million years ago, Nova Scotia straddled the equator. Dense tropical rainforest blanketed the region, and the trees that grew here -- giant lycopsids like Sigillaria and Lepidodendron, towering horsetails called Calamites -- were nothing like modern forests....

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Image: TravelingOtter from Houston, Texas, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Joggins: The Reptile in the Tree

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Larry from Charlottetown, PEI, Canada, CC BY 2.0. In 1852, Charles Lyell and Nova Scotian geologist William Dawson made a discovery that would ripple through the history of science. At Coal Mine Point, they found tetrapod fossils entombed inside an upright fossilized tree. Dawson's subsequent investigations revealed Hylonomus ly...

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Image: Larry from Charlottetown, PEI, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Joggins: Coal Age Galapagos

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cornellier, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Joggins Fossil Cliffs earned their UNESCO inscription in 2008 not just for individual specimens but for what they collectively represent: a complete snapshot of a Carboniferous rainforest ecosystem, sometimes called the Coal Age Galapagos. The cliffs record the moment when tr...

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Image: Cornellier | CC BY-SA 4.0