page_title: Joggins
section_title: Joggins Fossil Cliffs
hierarchical_section_title: Joggins / Joggins Fossil Cliffs
context_page_description: Joggins is a Canadian rural community located in western Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. On July 7, 2008 a 15-km length of the coast constituting the Joggins Fossil Cliffs was officially inscribed on the World Heritage List.
context_section_description: Joggins is famous for its record of fossils from a rainforest ecosystem approximately 310 million years ago, dating to the Pennsylvanian "Coal Age" during the Late Carboniferous Period.
  The dramatic coastal exposure of the Carboniferous (also known as Coal Age) rocks, known as the Joggins Fossil Cliffs, are continually hewn and freshly exposed by the actions of the tides in the Cumberland Basin. Geologists were first attracted to this locality in the late 1820s with Abraham Gesner, Richard Brown, Thomas Jackson and Francis Alger all making important observations. A little later, a party from Williams College, Massachusetts became the first student party to study Joggins for educational reasons in 1835. However, the true fame of Joggins dates to the mid-nineteenth century and the visits in 1842 and 1852 by Charles Lyell, the founder of modern geology and author of Principles of Geology. In his Elements of Geology (1871), Lyell proclaimed the Joggins exposure of Coal Age rocks and fossils to be "the finest example in the world".
  The fossil record at Joggins figures in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and played a role in the Great Oxford Debate of 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley.
  Much of the early work to document the fossil record at Joggins was by Nova Scotian geologist Sir William Dawson (1820–1899), who had a close personal and working relationship with his friend and mentor Charles Lyell. Much of Dawson's collection resides at the Redpath Museum of McGill University. Other notable nineteenth century geologists who worked at Joggins include Abraham Gesner, inventor of kerosene, and William Logan, who measured the cliffs bed by bed for the Geological Survey of Canada.
  In 1852 Lyell and Dawson made a celebrated discovery of tetrapod fossils entombed within an upright tree at Coal Mine Point. Subsequent investigations by Dawson led to the discovery of one of the most important fossils in the history of science, Hylonomus lyelli, which remains the earliest known sauropsid (reptile) in the history of life, but not oldest known amniote, the group that includes all vertebrates that can reproduce out of water. In 2002, Hylonomus lyelli was named the provincial fossil of Nova Scotia. Another vital early tetrapod fossil has been found here, the earliest synapsid, Protoclepsydrops, which is actually earlier than Hylonomus.ᵖ³⁹
  Other organisms found at the Joggins site include members of the calamites family, lepidodendron, sigillaria, ferns, various early amphibian species, numerous fish species (including evidence of coelacanths) and a variety of arthropod species.
  In addition to individual fossils, the Joggins Fossil Cliffs is of interest because it represents a time in Earth's history when a tropical rainforest covered Nova Scotia. Slightly more recent fossil finds indicate that these rainforests collapsed quickly, triggering a mass extinction event, the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse.
  Trackways made by the giant arthropod arthropleura are preserved at the Joggins Fossil Cliffs. The tree-like lycopodiophyte Sigillaria is famously preserved in situ at Joggins.
caption: An upright tree preserved in the cliffs at Joggins, Nova Scotia