The first discoveries

Around 1840, the newly formed Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) began exploring and mapping the newly formed United Province of Canada. Similarly, a few geologists in the New Brunswick Geology Branch studied the land that would later become a Canadian province in 1867. One of these expeditions reached the region where the Miguasha fossil site would later be discovered.

(44 kb)In the summer of 1842, Dr. Abraham Gesner, New Brunswick’s first Provincial Geologist, crossed the northern part of this area, mainly to explore for coal. Passionate about geology, Gesner was also a physician, chemist and naturalist, and history remembers him as the inventor of kerosene. Following the Ristigouche River through the Dalhousie region, he decided to cross the estuary to get a better look at the cliffs on the Canadian shore. This natural curiosity would make him the first official discoverer of the Escuminac Formation and its fossils.

In the 1843 report from the Geology Service, he states, “...I found the shore lined with a coarse conglomerate. Farther eastward the rocks are light blue sandstones and shales, containing the remains of vegetables. (...) In these sandstone and shales, I found the remains of fish, and a small species of tortoise with fossil foot-marks.”

We now know that this little “tortoise” was the famous Bothriolepis, a common placoderm fish. It was the very first mention of Miguasha fossils in a scientific publication. Despite the circulation of this report, Dr. Gesner’s discovery received little attention, and the cliffs would remain anonymous for several decades to come.

(36 kb)In 1879, the confederation of Canada had already united several provinces, including New Brunswick, and geologists from the Geological Survey of Canada could now explore this territory. In September of that year, Dr. Wheelock Ells unknowingly retraced Gesner’s steps. Surveying the south shore of the Ristigouche River, he decided to cross it to observe the Quebec stratigraphy more closely.

Just like Abraham Gesner did 37 years earlier, Ells reported on the fossil specimens from Miguasha, although he evidently thought it was their first mention. This time the news spread rapidly and caught the interest of many geologists. Over the following summers, Ells returned to the area with other geologists, including Arthur Humphreys Foord and Thomas Chesmer Weston, to conduct the first organized expeditions. The fossils were taken back to Ottawa where they were examined and described by GSC paleontologists Joseph Frederick Whiteaves, who studied the fish, and Sir John William Dawson (rector of Montreal’s McGill University), who studied the plants.

Arthur Humphreys Foord discovered most of the fish specimens described by Whiteaves, a contribution for which he was honoured in the naming of the species Eusthenopteron foordi. Foord worked for the Geological Survey of Canada from 1872 to 1883 as a scientific illustrator, and later garnered fame in Europe for his work on Carboniferous cephalopods in Ireland.

At a time when religious dogmas were being called into question by scientific discoveries, Weston recounts a revealing anecdote in his book Reminiscences Among the Rocks. While hammering rocks on the Miguasha beach, he stopped to examine a fish specimen as an elderly woman approached. “Well now, it do like [sic] a mackerel,” she told him, “But if God made stone fishes for some wise purpose that the poor mortals can’t understand and ought not to meddle with, and Sir, it would be much better for you to leave them where the Lord placed them.” Weston attempted to explain the principles of fossilization to the woman, but as soon as he said the words “millions of years”, she became frightened and left.

The discoveries of Ells, Foord and Weston, and the research of Whiteaves and Dawson, set into motion a great scientific adventure for the Miguasha site that has lasted for more than 125 years.