Mistaken Point named Canada’s latest World Heritage Site

580 million years after their seafloor habitat was buried in volcanic ash, some of our earliest ancestors are exposed. Mistaken Point is a 17km stretch of Newfoundland coastline that bears some of the oldest recognizable traces of life on Earth.

It has been chosen as Canada’s latest World Heritage Site.

The most common fossils at Mistaken Point are the "spindles"

Mistaken Point is known as a rich fossil site that spans the early Ediacaran Period, a time when multicellular life was transitioning from microscopic to macroscopic forms. Locals long knew about the “flowers” that are imprinted in the jagged rocks of the point but the site’s scientific value was not recognized until 1967. By 2006 it was widely recognized that Mistaken Point is one of a handful of sites worldwide that reveal what was happening during the Ediacaran, a time when Earth’s oceans were blossoming with biological activity, but long before there were fish, mollusks and crustaceans.

Reconstructed rangeomorph