At the southeastern tip of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, on a foggy headland sailors used to mistake for Cape Race before turning north onto the rocks, the shore holds the oldest large and architecturally complex organisms in the history of the Earth. The Mistaken Point biota is the oldest Ediacaran fossil community known anywhere, among the oldest remnants of multicellular life. The first fossil was found in June 1967 by Shiva Balak Misra, an Indian graduate student at Memorial University, and the species bears his name, Fractofusus misrai. A reserve was set up in 1984, made permanent in 1987 and enlarged in 2009 after more discoveries, and the fossil surfaces along the shore became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. The International Union of Geological Sciences calls it the best example in the world of an Ediacaran community where life first got big. It is a protected ecological reserve.
The oldest large, complex organisms on Earth · Ediacaran
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Newfoundland and Labrador
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