A few weeks back, on a magazine assignment in Quebec, I had the pleasure and excitement of seeing a place I’ve dreamed about going for many years. Like B.C.’s Burgess Shale, the cliffs of Joggins in Nova Scotia, and the Alberta Badlands, Miguasha National Park on the south side of Québec’s dramatic Gaspé Peninsula is important to biologists and paleontologists alike as an international fossil destination of note, a bucket-list pilgrimage I’ve wished to make for decades.
Like the other listed sites, finally getting to Miguasha and seeing not only some of the discoveries, but the beach on which they were made, was transformative.
Some 370 million years ago in the Devonian Period, the two-million-year snapshot of life preserved in the rich fossil beds of the Escuminac Formation, exposed in a seaside cliff at Miguasha, was part of a tropical estuary. The horizon was encircled by peaks of the Appalachians—freshly risen and more like the Rockies than their current rounded countenance. Primitive trees stood on the land, scuttled over by scorpions and spiders and centipedes, while a diversity of fish plied the warm, intertidal waters.
First discovered in 1842, by the 1880s thousands of fossil specimens were being collected here and distributed globally to museums and universities. It was recognized that the considerable biodiversity these represented—dozens of species of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, algae and micro-organisms—painted an almost complete picture of Devonian life. But it was fish fossils that made Miguasha famous. Some spiny and armour-plated species had already been around for a few million years. But a new tier of fishes had arisen in their midst that could crawl across mud flats, as well as breathe air.
These were the precursors for one of the most important steps in evolution, one which enabled our own lineage to come into being. The discovery of Eusthenopteron foordi in 1881, whose limb-like fins and two-way gill-and-lung respiratory system gave rise to the modern conception of evolution from aquatic fish to land-dwelling tetrapod, earned it the title “Prince of Miguasha.”
Where there’s a prince, there must be a king—but we’ll get to that.
It made sense to protect the site as a Canadian and Quebec national park, but its standing among the 60 or so Devonian fossil sites currently known is such that it has also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site to be preserved for all mankind: “In its representation of vertebrate life, Miguasha is the most outstanding fossil site in the world for illustrating the Devonian as the ‘Age of Fishes.’”
Heady stuff. But before I dig into it further, let me tell you a story.
About 25 years ago I was on another magazine assignment, crisscrossing Alberta with a paleontologist looking into the legal—and illegal—trade in fossils. After touring a commercial ammonite mine with its French-Canadian supervisor, Rene, we retired to his house to quench throats that were desert-parched after hours in blistering sun (kinda like this week in Whistler).
Passionate and talkative, Rene spun tales of fossil collecting in the world’s hinterlands until the beer was exhausted. Each anecdote was fondly rendered, but he positively ignited when talk turned to Miguasha, where he’d once spent several months. Maybe it was the beer or just the headiness of his experience, but Rene’s recollection of his first encounter with Eusthenopteron was compelling. After weeks of fruitless, backbreaking work, he’d been on his hands and knees wrestling a nodule from the deposit’s face when the rock suddenly cracked open and put him eye-to-eye with the three-dimensional, open-mouthed head of the fabled fish.
“Now dat—dat was reeeally sometin’,” he’d chuckled, shaking his head and stabbing the dark with a cigarette, its ember throwing just enough light to catch the sparkle in his eye. In that instant I saw that whatever else he might be—merchant, miner, mercenary—he was mostly a guy who’d glimpsed his own soul staring back through the gaping jaws of a 370 million-year-old fish. This notion of connection offers the clearest explanation for the lure—and monetary value—of fossils to humans: we don’t go back in time, time comes back to us.
The day I was there coincided with the International Symposium on Early and Lower Vertebrates. The first time this was held in Miguasha was in 1991; the results of that congress and its exposure to international scientists stimulated interest and research on the site’s fauna. Now, 33 years later, it was being held here again. And the reverence among participants for this hallowed ground was apparent by the way they walked the beach and the attention given presentations.
Miguasha’s worth is its quantity of fossils, a broad taxonomic and environmental representation, but also their quality, where even biological inferences are possible because of unusually good soft-tissue preservation; ingested prey is found inside some animals, as well as preserved nerves and mineralized blood vessels. Finding some species inside others is evidence that all of them were inhabiting the same ecosystem.
In addition, with so many fossils being found, entire growth series’ have been established for some species—which means all life stages of those species were also living in the same place. Others represented by only one life stage may not have lived their lives all in one spot, such as Le Roi de Miguasha (told you we’d get there), Elpistostege watsoni, a top predator but also lobe-finned debutante whose recent find is a great story of putting together paleontological puzzles in time and space, which I’ll leave for you to découvrir on your own.
Along the clifftop, the park’s “Evolution of Life” hiking loop reveals wonderful views over the Restigouche River estuary. Better, you walk along the famous beach. The cliffs aren’t high, but their intricate stratigraphy of siltstones and sandstones—continually shed onto the beach by erosion—explains how scientists can identify fish that died within days of each other 370 million years ago. And how, in 1881, one man came face-to-face with an answer to the burning question of how fish once crawled from the sea.
Leslie Anthony is a biologist, writer and author of several popular books on environmental science.
