Welcome to The Roarbots’ series of World Heritage Adventures. Similar to our NPS Adventures, this series takes a big-picture view of a single UNESCO World Heritage Site and highlights some of the best activities it has to offer. This is usually done through a kid-friendly lens and almost always includes activities and suggestions we can recommend from personal experience. And pictures. There are lots and lots of pictures. Glad to have you aboard!

Welcome to Joggins Fossil Cliffs!

Joggins might not have the name recognition of many of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It’s not exactly the Grand Canyon or Machu Picchu. But it’s a worth site nonetheless, and we heartily recommend the detour if you’re in the vicinity.

And it will be a detour since it’s fairly out of the way. Joggins is located on the Nova Scotia side of the Bay of Fundy, a relative stone’s throw from the New Brunswick border. But it’s not exactly on the way to anywhere else, so you’d realistically only be in this part of the province if you’re planning to visit Joggins.

For example, we were coming from the south and ended up traversing a wildlife preserve on a dirt road that got successively worse. Turns out, the “road” was actually a snowmobile path, but Google Maps thought we could handle it. In short? Make sure you have the time and patience to visit Joggins.

Stats

• Joggins Fossil Cliffs
• Location: Nova Scotia, Canada
• Inscribed: 2008
• Admission: $10.50 (Canadian) per adult; family, student, and senior rates available
• Social Sites: Twitter, Facebook

Despite its relative remoteness, Joggins is an amazingly rich site. It’s the best place in the world to see fossils that show the biodiversity of the Coal Age (354-290 million years ago). At that time, Joggins was home to giant insects, towering trees, and the first known reptiles.

All that’s left now are their fossilized remains, but the beach is a literal treasure trove of evidence dating back hundreds of millions of years. The fossil record there has turned up 195 species. Notably, the entire food chain of the terrestrial Coal Age ecosystem is represented at Joggins – from plants to invertebrates to predatory carnivores.

The property at Joggins is composed of more than 15 km (9.3 mi) of coastline and fossil-bearing cliffs along the Bay of Fundy. And all of it’s open for exploration. The cliffs themselves average more than 30 m (98 ft) in height and are constantly eroding. In fact, they’re retreating several inches per year, which is astonishing.

(Click on all pictures to embiggen.)

Visitor Center and Joggins Fossil Centre Museum

The museum is a fantastic place to begin exploring the fossil record at Joggins, as it presents more than 300 million years of history in easy-to-understand, layman’s language. If you’re not a rock hound and one rock looks like any other to you, get your bearings and dig into some context here before heading out to the beach.

Guided Tours

If you’ve made the trip here, you’ll want to take a tour. Trust me. Unless you’re a trained geologist or paleontologist, you won’t know what you’re looking at. It’ll just be a rocky beach, and the significance of the site will be lost.

Tour times vary depending on the tide schedule, so check availability in advance.

Joggins offers three different tours: the wanderer’s experience (30 minutes), the explorer’s experience (2 hours), and the adventurer’s experience (4 hours). We took the 30-minute tour and, frankly, I think this might be the best bet for most visitors.

The tour begins in the museum for a quick history lesson and to put the site in an evolutionary perspective. You then move outside and down to the beach where the tour guide will not only describe the site and how it developed over the millennia but also point out (and identify) dozens of fossils.

Even in a relatively quick half-hour, you’ll likely be overwhelmed with scientific names for rocks and prehistoric species, but you’ll walk away with a rich understanding of Joggins’ fossils that you wouldn’t be able to glean on your own. You’ll get to see fossils and learn about the paleontology, geology, and history of the area.

The 30-minute tour is an excellent introduction to the cliffs. The 2-hour tour is basically the same tour but only with additional walking, more time to go into greater depth on the subject matter, and a greater quantity of fossils are found. You’ll also have more time to ask questions and engage with the guide. The 4-hour tour? Double it again.

If you’re a rock hound or are deeply interested in fossils, you might want to consider these longer options. However, if you’ve got kids or only a passing interest in fossils, the 30-minute tour is by far the recommended way to go. Two (or four) hours of fossils will likely stretch your patience and interest, and you frankly run the risk of just getting bored.

Plus, the mosquitoes are merciless on the beach (or at least they were on the day we visited).