Miguasha

Miguasha National Park covers barely 87.3 hectares on the northern shore of the Restigouche river, on the southern coast of the Gaspé peninsula, in south-eastern Quebec. It is the smallest of the Quebec national parks and was created in 1985 by the Government of Quebec to protect the coastal exposure of the Escuminac Formation. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1999 under criterion (viii), considering it the world's most outstanding fossil site for the representation of vertebrate life in the Devonian, the period known as the Age of Fishes.

The Escuminac Formation dates from some 370 million years ago and is made up of alternating beds of sandstone, siltstone and shale. It extends eight kilometres long by one wide and reaches a hundred metres in height, across four exposures; the most important, three kilometres long and up to thirty metres high, essentially constitutes the park. Five of the six great groups of Devonian fossil fish are represented in it, but its capital importance lies in the sarcopterygians, or lobe-finned fishes: here are preserved the greatest number and the best-preserved specimens in the world of this group, from which the first air-breathing terrestrial tetrapod vertebrates arose. Eusthenopteron foordi, the site's emblematic fossil, is one of the key pieces for understanding that transition.

The site has been known since 1842, when Abraham Gesner collected the first specimens and sent them to the Royal Scottish Museum and the British Museum; since then it has also appeared in the scientific literature as Escuminac Bay, Scaumenac Bay or Hugh Miller Cliffs. Some 13,000 specimens have been recovered and the park museum holds a collection of more than 9,000. A provincial mining act of 1990 prohibited the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons and minerals across a periphery of some 775 hectares divided among a hundred or so private owners; in 2004 Quebec raised that band to the status of a reserve, so that any action requires prior ministerial authorisation. Fieldwork remains active and continues to produce finds.