'We can only grow from here': Fossil centre to open in Valley Waters
Fossils found in the Norton area include whole fish not seen anywhere else
Southern New Brunswick will soon be getting a place to showcase its very, very long history.
The Valley Waters Visitor Information and Fossil Centre is set to open Tuesday morning.
The area has seen important fossil finds since the early 1900s.
While there had been efforts to mark this in the past, Valley Waters Mayor Randy McKnight said it was only recently that the stars aligned to open the centre.
McKnight said the previous municipality of Norton wanted to open a centre of some kind but couldn't secure funding.
New
Brunswick Museum researchers found fossilized footprints in Valley
Waters belonging to an amphibian that walked the Earth roughly 350
million years ago. (New Brunswick Museum/Submitted)
It wasn't until reforms led to the creation of the new municipality of Valley Waters that the centre started to become a reality.
"After we started this journey as a community … we identified tourism as one of the major areas for development for Valley Waters. And this ties in really well to that," said McKnight.
Most of the fossils in the area were formed in the Paleozoic Era, but Valley Waters and southern New Brunswick at that time would be unrecognizable to current residents.
It was located somewhere near present-day Brazil, had a tropical climate, and was largely underwater or marshy, which contributed to the number of fossils.
"The Lake would have been stratified: there would've been no oxygen at the bottom and lots of oxygen at the top, with fish swimming around at the top," said Matt Stimson, the New Brunswick Museum's assistant curator of geology and paleontology.
"As they died, or as plants were washed into them catastrophically during earthquakes and landslides, they'd be buried at the bottom of these lakes and preserved to be studied 350 million years later."
Some of the fossils found in the area include whole fish not seen anywhere else, rare amphibian tracks and whole pieces of trees including a Sanfordiacaulis densifolia, which Stimson describes as something from Doctor Seuss's The Lorax.
The tracks of an ancient amphibian preserved in rock discovered in Norton, now part of Valley Waters. (New Brunswick Museum/Submitted)
The centre will include representations of what the area would have looked like 350 million years ago, and fossils on loan from the New Brunswick Museum.
McKnight is excited about the prospects for the new centre.
"It is a small start," he said. "We can only grow from here."
With files from Information Morning Summer
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