Mistaken Point

Mistaken Point lies at the south-eastern tip of the Avalon peninsula, in Newfoundland. The property inscribed by UNESCO on 17 July 2016 is 146 hectares: a narrow strip of 17 kilometres of naturally eroding coastal cliffs, with a further 74 hectares of buffer zone on its landward margin. It lies almost entirely within the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, a provincial site of 5.7 km² designated in the 1980s.

The rock sequence, two kilometres thick and of deep marine origin, dates from the middle Ediacaran, between 580 and 560 million years ago, and contains the oldest assemblages of large fossils known on the planet. They document a turning point in the history of life: the appearance of large, biologically complex organisms after almost three billion years of evolution dominated by micro-organisms. These soft-bodied creatures lived long before animals developed skeletons, and they were preserved because they were buried in the very muddy floor where they lived by successive flows of sediment laden with volcanic ash. Those ash layers contain zircon crystals, which allows them to be dated with great precision. Although Ediacaran fossils occur in Russia, Australia, China and Namibia, the antiquity, abundance and variety of those at Mistaken Point make them unique, and the site preserves the oldest and most diverse deep-sea floor communities of their kind, including some of the earliest evidence of animal locomotion.

The fossil beds were known to hunters and to people from the nearby communities during the twentieth century; the children who played on them called them "flowers in the rocks". Their significance was not understood until 1967, when Shiva Balak Misra, a student at Memorial University, and his field assistant Paul Thompson were mapping Precambrian rocks along the coast. Access to the fossil surfaces is possible only on a guided visit with an official interpreter, after a walk of some 45 minutes across the coastal barrens.