At Joggins, on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy coast, the shoreline is a geological archive continually exposed by erosion and tides. UNESCO inscribed the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in 2008 because the cliffs preserve an exceptionally complete record of terrestrial life from the Pennsylvanian part of the Carboniferous, the period often called the Coal Age. The protected property covers 689 hectares and includes about 14.7 kilometres of coastal exposures. Visitors come for a dramatic sea view, but the more revealing experience is to read the rock layers as evidence of ancient environments rather than as scenery alone.
Roughly 300 million years ago, this region lay near the equator and supported extensive wet forests. Over time, plant material and sediment accumulated, were buried and became part of the coal-bearing strata visible today. Joggins preserves upright fossil tree trunks at several levels, alongside animal, plant and trace fossils. Because the remains occur in the geological layers where the organisms lived and were buried, researchers can reconstruct relationships between the forest, waterways and the animals that inhabited them. The cliffs offer a rare record of an ecosystem, not simply a collection of disconnected specimens.