Joggins
Standing in a 300-million-year-old rainforest in the centre of Pangaea, just south of the equator, six-foot-long woodlouse-like beasts patrol the jungle floor while eight-foot-long sharks with spiny swords chase dinner in the waters. Giant mayflies buzz through the humid air, scorpions scuttle underfoot and lobe-finned fish scramble around the big lycopod trees to the next pond.
A cold breeze comes off the Bay of Fundy, blasting me back to the 21st century. Joggins continues its long emigration from the middle of the global continent, drifting ever further from its old neighbourhood. The creatures that once lived here have vanished, leaving only ancient footprints on rock, or the image of their body set in stone like flowers pressed between the pages of a book. Lying near the stretching tide, a broken column of rock that would be at home in ancient Greece is the ghostly remains of the lycopods. The soil of the rainforest has been crushed into coal.
Brian Hebert, chief interpreter at the Joggins Fossil Cliffs Centre, has been roaming these beaches since he was a boy.
“My father and I were down at the beach one day when we noticed a couple of things on the rock and I wanted to figure out what they were,” the 30-year-old says. He headed to the library, read up and returned to the beach. He started meeting other fossil hunters, amateur and professional, and dug deeper into the mystery. “I knew something was odd when I was 16 and I was taking tours for the Department of National Resources. At the end of the tour, I’d be like, ‘I gotta go to school. I took today off – I have to go to school tomorrow to make it up.’”
The philosopher-paleontologist walks the beaches confidently, fielding questions on the origins of life, where it’s going and what it all means; all the while his sharp eyes scan the beach for new finds. He talks about the big millipedes, comparing them unfavorably to the ancestral dinosaurs, who first came ashore here.
“Don’t take me the wrong way: Arthropleura are cool, but they really didn’t make a huge difference. The reptiles are the difference-maker here in Joggins,” he says. “Those reptiles coming on land, this is the first place in the world that ever happened. From those reptiles came dinosaurs, and from that birds.”
While dynamite was used to explore the cliffs in the past, the tides are left to do the work now, digging a deeper cross-section into the fossilized forest with each rise and fall.
Back up in the gorgeous new centre, a state-of-the-art building that generates most of its own electricity and recycles rain water, Don Reid walks among the display cases, showing me his favourite finds. The 87-year-old amateur paleontologist has been combing Joggins for nearly eight decades.
“When I first started, I didn’t really know what I was doing. People was calling them fossils, and I was wondering what a fossil was. I really started collecting them on account of the pretty patterns,” Reid explains. He started running into professionals on the beach and peppered them with questions; he was amazed by the answers. “After I found out what they really were, it kinda got on my back and I couldn’t get rid of it.”
His father was badly hurt in a coal-mining accident when Red was 13. The boy dropped out of Grade 6 to work at the mines to feed his family. He kept returning to the beach, putting the fossils in a little trailer and carting them home for safe keeping. In time, the visiting experts would seek him out for a guided tour. “I found things that nobody else in the world has got. They’re world class.”
Eventually, he converted an old building in his backyard into a low-budget fossil museum. That collection forms the core of the new Joggins centre; he donated it to the centre just before the cliffs were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site last year.
Reid’s collection was worth money, too, for men less scrupulous than he. “I’ve had people come into my (old) centre and say, ‘You wanna sell that piece? Come on outside and we’ll talk.’ They’d offer big money: ‘Name your price.’”
“I’d say no, it’s not for sale. My dream was this,” he says, gesturing to the
centre, “this million-dollar building. You look at the sign outside – it says ‘Joggins Fossil Centre.’ That’s what I put on the old shed when I opened up.”
He’s still on the sand, scanning the tide-swept beaches for new finds. “You lay down, shut your eyes to go to sleep at night and you see them. That thrill is still there.”
I ask what drives him out there over and over again. He smiles, as though the tides make it obvious. “We have a new beach every day.”
- First published in the Chronicle-Herald June 21, 2009