No bones about it: If this is the summer of the staycation, get to know your fossils

Let's talk fossils. Newfoundland is rich in them. 

For a long time, I was indifferent to the appeal of ancient bones. I'm from Prince Edward Island, and there are no fossil beds. 

Unlike the granite cliffs of Newfoundland, our sandstone just erodes into the sea. We have our plucky, red-haired orphan and all the trappings that come with her, but dinosaurs and their predecessors are scarce on the ground. 

Recently, I've become fascinated with fossils. I listen to podcasts about paleontology. I'm constantly picking up pieces of shale and wondering if the indentation is the remains of an ancient bug. 

Just on Friday, the Discovery Global Geopark — which you can access from Port Union, on the Bonavista Peninsula — received official UNESCO status.

Until now, I've never taken the time to visit one of the wonderful fossil sites of Newfoundland. 

Since this is the summer of the staycation, I decided to plan a little trip to two of the island's best fossil sites. If you're in the St. John's area, each is a great day trip. 

Manuels River: Find a fossil with your picnic 

Manuels River is fantastic. Do yourself a favour and make an entire day of exploring it. 

The Manuels River Interpretation Centre offers two different guided hikes: one on foraging and biodiversity, while the second focuses on fossils. I only had enough time to take the fossil hike. Each takes about an hour and a half.  

Science interpreter Madison Acker explained the significance of the on-site specimens to me. 

"The fossils on this hike are about 500 million years old. They were formed during what scientists refer to as 'the Cambrian Explosion.'" 

This time period is so named because it represents when life gave rise to the biodiversity continuing today. 

Acker also explained that Manuels is well known for its amount of trilobite fossils and the high quality of the fossil beds. "Fossil hunters are really excited by trilobites," she said. "They are really fascinating to look at and we have so many great examples of them on site."

For the uninitiated, trilobites were early arthropods—a group that also includes spiders and crustaceans. From my non-academic layperson viewpoint, the fossils look like indentations of large scary creepy-crawlies. They are considered by scientists to be one of the most successful early animals. They lived for over 300 million years and evolved to have many different lifestyles. Some crawled the sea beds and were predators, others were scavengers and filter feeders, some swam, and others even crawled onto land.

"Trilobites are not necessarily rare. They can be found in lots of fossil beds around the world, especially Wales and Belgium. But we're very fortunate to have a fossil bed that lies flat, that's accessible, that hasn't been destroyed by the movement of the Earth's plates." 

While the interpretation centre will remain closed this summer, the staff are nonetheless excited to welcome visitors to the trails, and in fact will be hosting outdoor events all summer. Guided fossil tours are offered Wednesday to Sunday. Every tour includes a sift through the shale to try to find a fossil of your own. However, Manuels River is a protected site, so all fossils do need to remain on location. 

Manuels River is also an amazing picnic spot. I saw folks biking the trails, picking berries and fishing.

Mistaken Point: A treat that's worth the hike 

Mistaken Point, a world UNESCO site, is a two-hour jaunt from St. John's. You'll need to book a tour in advance and once you've arrived, you'll take a three-kilometre hike out to the site (six kilometres total). 

Also, make sure the shocks on your car are in good working order because the last part of the journey is on a rough, pothole-riddled road. 

This might sound like a bit of work, but trust me, you're in a for a treat. 

Remember when I mentioned the Cambrian period above? The fossils at Mistaken Point are from the pre-Cambrian period, and that means the fossils are unrecognizable, strange and alien. These creatures existed at a time when the earth was a vast sea, millions of years before animals developed skeletons. 

The imprints of their soft tissues were preserved on the muddy sea floor when they were suddenly buried by waves of volcanic sediment.

I contacted Rod S. Taylor, a paleontologist at Memorial University, to discover just how important the site is. 

"If you're an Ediacaran paleontologist, Newfoundland is the most exciting place to work in the world," he said. "There are other places with amazing fossils from this time period, but those fossils are often distorted and stretched—think of them as chocolate bars melted in the sun."

Taylor explained that the heat and pressure caused them to alter their shape.

"Many of the fossils here in Newfoundland are preserved with very little distortion — they've been flattened from top to bottom by compression, but haven't been heated to the point of melting. The Manuels River trilobites show almost no distortion. The Mistaken Point fossils do show a little distortion, but not enough to damage the fine details preserved in the fossils." 

The fossils on site range in age from 560 million to 580 million years old, and were discovered in the late 1960s. At that time, different museums came to Newfoundland, cutting large samples out of the rock beds.

"We're actually working really hard right now to get those fossils back. In defence of those museums, it was a different time, and they were trying to educate and preserve, but we believe fossils belong at their natural sites."

Fossil theft is an actual crime that continues today

"Stealing fossils from a site like this, a site that houses the earliest fossils on record, is a loss to science that cannot be measured."

I don't get to chat with that many paleontologists, so I took advantage and asked Taylor if there was anything about paleontology that he wanted to debunk.

He hesitated for only a minute.

"I think a lot of people believe that fossils are the actual bones of dinosaurs, but we rarely get to study proper organic material," he said. 

"Occasionally, they'll unearth a mastodon trapped in ice somewhere, but generally the original material is replaced by other minerals over time, producing a replica of the original organism (or bone, or shell). And don't get me started on the problems in Jurassic Park!"

The oldest resident in The Rooms

I'm running out of space for this article, but both Taylor and Acker pointed me in the direction of the Haootia quadriformis ("haootia" comes from the Beothuk word for "demon") displayed at The Rooms. 

Discovered in 2008, it's the oldest complex animal fossil ever found and is the earliest evidence of muscle tissue in the world's biological record.

I think that warrants a visit, don't you?

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