Mistaken Point (Earth's Oldest Fossils Land), Newfoundland, Canada

Mistaken Point is a globally significant Ediacaran fossil site almost entirely located within Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve on the south-eastern tip of the island of Newfoundland in eastern Canada. The 146-hectare property consists of a narrow, 17-kilometre-long strip of rugged naturally-eroding coastal cliffs, with an additional 74 hectares adjoining its landward margin designated as a buffer zone. The superbly exposed, 2-kilometre-thick rock sequence of deep marine origin at Mistaken Point dates to the middle Ediacaran Period (580 to 560 million years ago) and contains exquisitely preserved assemblages of the oldest abundant and diverse, large fossils known anywhere.

More than 10,000 fossil impressions, ranging from a few centimeters to nearly 2 meters in length, are readily visible for scientific study and supervised viewing along the coastline of Mistaken Point. These fossils illustrate a critical watershed in the early history of life on Earth: the appearance of large, biologically complex organisms, including the first ancestral animals. Most of the fossils are rangeomorphs, an extinct group of fractal organisms positioned near the base of animal evolution. These soft-bodied creatures lived on the deep-sea floor, and were buried and preserved in exceptional detail by influxes of volcanic ash – each layer of ash creating an “Ediacaran Pompeii.” Modern erosion has exhumed more than 100 fossil sea-floor surfaces, ranging from small beds with single fossils to larger surfaces adorned with up to 4,500 mega fossils. The animals died where they lived, and their resultant fossil assemblages preserve both the morphology of extinct groups of ancestral animals and the ecological structure of their ancient communities. Radiometric dating of the volcanic ash beds that directly overlie the fossil-bearing surfaces is providing a detailed chronology for 20 million years in the early evolution of complex life.

 

 

 

Mistaken Point fossils constitute an outstanding record of a critical milestone in the history of life on Earth, “when life got big” after almost three billion years of microbe-dominated evolution. The fossils range in age from 580 to 560 million years, the longest continuous record of Ediacara-type mega fossils anywhere, and predate by more than 40 million years the Cambrian explosion, being the oldest fossil evidence of ancestors of most modern animal groups. Mistaken Point contains the world’s oldest-known examples of large, architecturally complex organisms, including soft-bodied, ancestral animals. Ecologically, Mistaken Point contains the oldest and most diverse examples of Ediacaran deep-sea communities in the world thus preserving rare insights into the ecology of these ancestral animals and the early colonization of the deep-sea floor. Other attributes contributing to the property’s Outstanding Universal Value include the world’s first examples of metazoan locomotion, exceptional potential for radiometric dating of the assemblages, and evidence for the role of ancient oxygen levels in the regional and global appearance of complex multi cellular life.

The first fossil to be found in the area, Fractofusus misrai, was discovered in June 1967 by Shiva Balak Misra, an Indian graduate student studying geology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The reserve was first established provisionally by the provincial government in 1984 and was permanently designated in 1987. It was later expanded in 2009 after further fossil discoveries.

The fossil sites along the shore within the reserve were inscribed to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list on July 17, 2016

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