The bone is believed to have come from a large, ancient creature, likely an amphibian, and was found in Northwest Cove, an area of the Codroy Valley near St. Andrews. Measuring near 12 centimetres long, the discovery was made by Memorial University of Newfoundland graduate student Lina Stolze, who was studying the region’s carboniferous rocks as part of student research field trip to the west coast.
While similar fossils have been found in slightly younger rocks at the Joggins World Heritage Site in Nova Scotia, the single bone found at Northwest Cove is around 325 million years old and is believed to be the first of its kind uncovered in the province.
“We kind of wondered if there was a chance of finding something there, but even if you speculate it doesn’t mean you’re going to find anything,” said Dr. Liam Herringshaw, one of the researchers from the Department of Earth Sciences on hand when the discovery was made. “When Lina found the bone, it was a mixture of ‘cool, there definitely are things here,’ but also ‘wow, it’s a bit of a surprise.’”
While Newfoundland is known in the geologic community as a good place to find marine fossils, Dr. Herringshaw said the latest find is a significant one since it captures evidence of the earliest creatures to crawl out of ancient oceans onto land.
“In terms of land animals, there’s almost nothing. Partly because most of the rocks are too old, there are no dinosaur-bearing rocks on the island of Newfoundland,” he said. “ This would seem to be the first evidence we’ve got of really ancient land animals. The rocks we were looking at were 325 million years old and that’s 75 million years before dinosaurs appear, so it’s a pretty early vertebrate.”
The group also found fossilized trails which seem to have been made by a snail of some kind. Although he specializes in marine fossils, as opposed to the lushly vegetated, river floodplain environment of the Northwest Cove site, Dr. Herringshaw believes the potential exists for similar discoveries in the future.
“It’s almost there for somebody to spend more time looking for different signs of animal life, whether it’s bones and shells themselves or the trails that things leave behind as they move around,” he said. “ I think with more study, there’s the potential to get a much better picture of what was going on and then to see whether there are similarities and differences with the sites known from elsewhere in Canada and the world. At the moment we just one bone discovered, so it’s the very early days.”
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