Imagine Newfoundland as a tropical oasis. Four hundred and sixty million years ago, that’s just what some of the Great Northern Peninsula was — part of an ancient coastline near the equator. At the same time, incidentally, what is now the Avalon Peninsula was near Antarctica, part of a different ancient continent.
North of Gros Morne National Park, Highway 430 opens onto a vast coastal plain with Long Range Mountains bordering it to the east and the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the west. This expanse stretches north-northeast as far as you can see. Stunted boreal forest, fens, and grassy plains reach inland to the mountains, many kilometres distant. People often spot Newfoundland’s iconic caribou near the road.
About 100 kilometres north of Rocky Harbour, you’ll pass through the hamlet of Bellburns before arriving at an apparently unremarkable area of mostly barren rock and gravel between the highway and the water. Little would you know you were looking at a globally significant fossil site, if not for a few small signs indicating the boundary of a remarkable provincial ecological reserve.
This is Table Point, a lonely square kilometre of land and shoreline on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It’s home to one of the world’s most diverse and well preserved groupings of fossils from the Middle Ordovician period, some 460 million years ago. The grey, weathered limestone rock where people find fossils covers the shore beneath a low cliff, appearing to fan out like flowing cake batter. Here lies the story of a moment in time written in the rock, where you can continue your Newfoundland journey in the fourth dimension, time travelling into the past almost half a billion years to a tropical sea where myriad creatures teem.
The thousands of marine fossils found at Table Point over more than a century help reveal the story of the rise of complex life on Earth. (An aside: government designated the reserve a protected area in 1990 to stop collectors’ decades-long removal of the scientifically priceless fossils.)
Written in the rock here is a snapshot of the 10-million-year period between 458 and 468 million years ago, when there was an explosion of new animals and the diversity of life was rapidly increasing in the biosphere. The variety of ancient species found at the site include crab-like (but unrelated) trilobites, snail-like gastropods, squid-like cephalopods, sponges, lace-like bryozoans, crinoids (sea-lilies), conodonts, some of the earliest known animals with backbones, and brachiopods.
You can still find brachiopods, called Northern lampshells, today in the waters around Newfoundland. Similar to clams in appearance, but completely unrelated, they are considered living fossils that remain virtually unchanged in the last half billion years.
About 490 million years ago — just a blink of geological time before the Table Point assemblage of fossils formed — a massive die-off of life called the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction event occurred (for which a rock formation at Green Point, in Gros Morne National Park, is the official global geological benchmark, further cementing Newfoundland’s place in the history book of life). A rapid flowering of new species followed this die-off, evidence of which we find today at this remarkable place called Table Point.
Although there are no directional or information signs present, would-be visitors to the fossils can access the shore from the highway at points just to the north of the cliffs. From there they can walk back south along the shore towards the point below the cliff where the fossils are.
Find more visitor information for on the provincial website for the Table Point Ecological Reserve.