Anticosti

Anticosti, the largest island in Quebec, lies in the Gulf of St Lawrence between the Jacques-Cartier and Honguedo straits. With more than 9,200 km² and 550 kilometres of coastline, it holds the thickest stratigraphic succession and the most complete and best-preserved fossil record of the first mass extinction of animal life on a global scale, which took place between 447 and 437 million years ago, at the transition from the Late Ordovician to the Early Silurian. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List on 19 September 2023 under criterion (viii); it was an interval of Earth's history that until then had not been represented on the List.

The island exposes an almost continuous succession of carbonate rocks laid down in a shallow tropical sea, with the Vauréal, Ellis Bay, Becscie, Gun River and Jupiter formations covering some ten million years. More than 1,440 fossil taxa have been described, the greatest taxonomic diversity and the greatest abundance of invertebrates of all the known localities of the end-Ordovician extinction, an event in which an estimated 85 % of species disappeared. There are sites of exceptional preservation with soft-bodied benthic fauna, algae, cyanobacteria, foraminifera, sponges, corals, annelids, molluscs, brachiopods, arthropods, crinoids, graptolites and conodonts, as well as dense banks of brachiopod shells and tropical reefs. Thousands of bedding surfaces allow whole marine communities, buried at a stroke by passing storms, to be studied with their ecological structure intact. Preservation is so good that the shells retain their original chemical signature, which makes it possible to reconstruct ancient climatic and oceanographic signals.

The inscribed property comprises all the fossil-bearing beds exposed along the coast and along the Vauréal and Jupiter rivers, and lies entirely within a network of strictly protected areas: a projected biodiversity reserve, a Quebec national park and two ecological reserves. The island is also Notiskuan ("where bears are hunted") to the Innu and Natogostec ("the land of before") to the Mi'kmaq, and the Innu communities of Ekuanitshit and Nutashkuan, in whose Nitassinan the property lies, gave their consent and took an active part in the nomination. Barely 200 people live there.