Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ARTHROPLEURA
The most significant creatures to come out of the Coal Age, however, were diminutive—the first reptiles. A
record of the emergence of this animal group is uniquely preserved at Joggins, which Abraham Gesner de-
scribed as “the place where the delicate herbage of a former world is now transmuted into stone.”
The importance of this area to our understanding of the Coal Age and to the evolution of life on Earth was
sealed in the mid-19th century when the Scottish-born founder of modern geology, Sir Charles Lyell, first vis-
ited. He had come to see the fossil tree trunks that are preserved in the upright growing position in the cliffs.
(The fact that the trees were fossilized in the position in which they had grown contributed to the understand-
ing of how coal itself was formed, confirming that coal beds developed in place from a living forest rather than
from dead plant material that had drifted into place— a common misunderstanding of the time promulgated by
no less a luminary than Charles Darwin.) Lyell was duly impressed, and stated in a letter that the forest of
fossil coal trees was “the most wonderful phenomenon perhaps that I have seen,” and that “this subterranean
forest exceeds in extent and quantity of [fossil] timber all that have been discovered in Europe put together.”
Lyell was so taken with the degree of preservation at Joggins that he returned to the site a second time, a dec-
ade later, in 1852, in the company of the young Canadian geologist Sir John William Dawson. On this occa-
sion, what they discovered inside one of these fossil tree trunks would provide insight into the evolution of the
first truly terrestrial creatures—reptiles.
