Dinosaur Island PEI’s new fossil hunting tour STORY AND PHOTOS BY DARCY RHYNO
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’m standing on a 10-metre-long tree trunk that fell 300 million years ago. It’s wide at the base and stretches out as straight as it was tall. The top is nowhere to be seen among the ordinary rocks on this rough red beach, but it must have been a giant in a forest of giants. “Pretty crazy,” says geologist Laura MacNeil. “Here we have PEI’s largest fossil. It starts right here and goes all the way to...” She takes a dozen steps from the base of the tree to where I’m standing. “To here. It’s a very cool site. I never get sick of seeing these fossils.” MacNeil has worked as an interpreter at Joggins Fossil Cliffs in Nova Scotia and the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta. After returning home to the island, she started Prehistoric Island Tours. Today’s group tour is at a location she prefers not to disclose. Unlike those other famous Canadian locations, PEI has no natural history museum. The most significant of the recent discoveries on the island are in storage at PEI
National Park, but with no other resources, she fears sites like this could suffer from too much public attention. This 75-minute tour is the only way to see them. The tree I’m standing on, she tells us, is Walchia. “It’s literally the earliest known conifer tree in the rock record. Handing around an artist’s rendition of the living tree, she adds, “If you’ve ever heard of a Norfolk Island Pine, they look very similar.
We’ve found some fronds from the tree on PEI, but they’re softer and you need special conditions to preserve them.” A boy on the tour runs up to MacNeil with a handful of fossilized wood. Two species are quite common on this beach— Walchia and a type of tree fern. Everyone on today’s tour has found at least a few pieces of both. Fossils of the two species look completely different from each other. Tree fern fossils often have sets of tightly packed circles, which hint at the ancient growth patterns. Rather than trunks, tree ferns stand upright on small roots bound together. When these trees fell, PEI was a steaming swamp in the middle of the supercontinent, Pangea. “Imagine you’re standing right here 300 million years ago,” MacNeil says. “The temperature is 40°C. The closest
Scouring the beach for fossils on Prehistoric Island Tours. Top: cast of a pre-dinosaur creature that lived on what is now PEI.
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PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
