More from My Nova Scotia Road Trip-Joggins-Part 6

  Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you. This weekend we are trying to wrap up some winterizing projects. Are you up to anything fun?

  FYI-My post is a bit long today 😅, so if you're going to read it, get comfy and put up your feet. Maybe even pour yourself a drink. Grin.

  Today I'm taking you back to Nova Scotia where my husband, our 2 dogs and I visited back in September. While staying in Truro, Nova Scotia, we visited a small town called Joggins. We went there because Joggins has a World Heritage Fossil site, and I am totally fascinated by fossils and other things that come out for the ground.  

   Joggins was about an hours drive northwest of Truro,  almost into New Brunswick and as I found while checking it out on my phone, only about a 30 minute drive to the bridge that connects New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island.   You can see on the map below where it is located.

  I know this post might not interest everyone and might not be a place you'd drive out to visit. But if you're interested in looking back at life in pre-human times, fossils are the way to go.

  The red circle in this next photo is the location of where Joggins was located back in the time when the fossils  found at the site were formed.

   The fossils at Joggins take you back to the Carboniferous Period. To put that in a modern reference, this is the time when the plants that formed the world's coal and fossil fuels deposits lived. At that time the area where Joggins is located was below the equator and part of the super-continent Pangea, as was  much of North America and obviously many other places too. And just as another time reference, dinosaurs still haven't evolved yet, so for those of you who like to keep things simple, this was a very long time ago, pre-age of the dinosaurs. 

    It was a hot, wet and  lush time, but the plants growing at that time were not our modern tropical species. In fact the trees were  hollow horsetails; not modern trees that we know. (Our modern trees wouldn't evolve for millions of years.)  In our modern times,  horse tails (Equisetum) are usually fairly short (no more than 5 feet/ 1.5 meters) and could pass for grasses if you didn't know what you were looking for.  Here's a photo  from the internet of modern horsetails. 

But during the Carboniferous, horsetails were the size of  trees, often 60-169 feet/18-49 meters tall. 

    This model  in the museum at Joggins  shows where scientists and fossil explorers have found some of the fossils. Notice this little lizard or salamander inside the example of a fossilized  hollow horsetail.

   This next photo shows an actual fossilized piece from a horsetail tree that was found at the site. It isn't hollow mainly because when it fossilized it was buried in other material which filled in the middle. 

    The museum was quite interesting and a great place to start our visit. It wasn't large, but it explained how  Joggins is located in an area where a lot of coal formed millions of years ago and then was collected over the last few hundred years.  While removing this coal, many fossils were found.

   The museum also housed some really nice fossils and some models of coal aged creatures like giant dragonflies. However, like in most museums, it's hard to get photos of things under glass because you get so much light glare.

   This above photo was a view under some glass flooring. The creature is a model of a giant millipede that was common at that time. 

Above are some fossilized leaves, and below is a fossilized footprint.

And here are some fossilized ferns.

This last view I'm sharing  is really cool because these raindrops dropped into some mud. Then the mud hardened and the raindrops fossilized. 

Here's a few wall signs that explained life both in the Carboniferous and in the "present" at Joggins.

And yes, I did step inside the hollow tree model. 😀

  After we finished in the museum, we went down onto the beach and searched for fossils. It was amazing; there were so many of them. However, you were not allowed to take them, but you could take photos. 

   Here's the beach. As with Burntcoat Head, since we were still in the upper Bay of Fundy, there is a 3 hour window at low tide you can search the beach for fossils. 

  Here's a few fossils I found or saw while taking a little walk. I'm not sure what most of them are, but it was fun to find and see them.

    The black lines on the left and center top are some kind of fossil.

This next one part of a leaf of some sort.

This one is probably the best fossilized leaf I saw.

Here's a couple more but I'm not sure if they are plant or animal.

This edge  of a large rock is the fossilized edge of a horsetail tree .

    This next photo goes back to that millipede model I shared earlier in this post. It was the greenish creature under the glass floor that was in the museum.

   I didn't find this but the man who did was there trying to make a cast of it. He was very excited to share his discovery. What you see is not the actual millipede, but you can see the tracks made while the millipede crawled through the mud with all its tiny legs and dragging its body. Look just to the right of the coin he placed on the rock for reference and you can see all the little feet impressions. 

  

  If this next photo looks just like textured rock, it is. But it's also a huge group of clam shells that somehow got lumped together and then fossilized. They call it clam rock.

   And this final fossil was a bit more obvious (the dark area on this grey rock), even if I am standing a bit away from it. I like how I caught my shadow. 

   And if you aren't into fossils, maybe you like wildflowers. I certainly love them too, and so let me end this post with a few photos also at this park.

   OK, this post is long enough. Especially if you're not into fossils.  😏 Have a super start to your weekend.