09/01/2026
Research update #16: A "CHANCE" DISCOVERY. Those with long memories might remember a 2017 CBC article (see comments) outlining a fossil find by Harvard's Dr. Stephanie Pierce. It's this deposit that brought her team back in 2018 and 2019, and (after an absence imposed by a pandemic, hurricane, and presidential politics), once again this summer.
Sometimes fossil finds really are accidental, but most of the time paleontologists are prospecting with an informed eye. Sometimes we look at sites that are already known to produce fossils. But to find new localities, we spend time walking stretches of coastline that have the "right" type of rocks.
What does "right" mean? In Cape Breton, it basically means any Carboniferous sandstone or shale deposit (literally hundreds of kilometers of coast!).
Often a productive rock layer might only be half a meter thick, hidden among kilometers of non-productive rocks. To find them, we employ a classic detective's trick: following "footprints" back to our suspect.
As a rock layer erodes, loose chunks containing fragments of fossils will be transported along a beach by coastal currents. It's these loose chunks we spend most of our time looking at. Once we find a fragment of a fossil, we then follow the increasing abundance of similar loose rocks back to its source bed.
That's what Dr. Pierce did in 2017. A chance discovery of a small piece of bone in a loose beach rock allowed her to identify a truly remarkable fossil deposit. Located in a bed only about 20 meters wide were littered parts of the bones of a still top-secret animal.
