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Tynemouth Creek Transcript
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Dr. Randall Miller, Research Curator, Geology and Palaeontology, New Brunswick Museum
It’s a nice foggy day on the Bay of Fundy coastline with the waves crashing in. We’re here looking at the Tynemouth Creek Formation in southern New Brunswick. These are Upper Carboniferous age rocks, they’re about 318 million years old. They were first looked at by Abraham Gesner as early as 1840. These rocks are really quite interesting and we have been coming back to them ever since Gesner to look for fossils and the look at the stratigraphy here. Recently there have been new discoveries of plant fossils. There have also been some interesting discoveries of tetrapod footprints. These are trackways left by reptiles and amphibians. Reptile footprints may represent some of the earliest reptiles that sort of left the swamps and moved into higher land. The other trace fossil that has been really interesting here is a thing called Diplichnites, this is a footprint trackway about thirty centimetres wide, and it was made by an animal called Arthropleura. These are millipede-like animals that grew up to about a metre long.
