Miguasha National Park

Miguasha National Park was designated as a World Heritage site by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee under the following criterion:

Criterion (viii): In its representation of vertebrate life, Miguasha is the most outstanding fossil site in the world for illustrating the Devonian as the “Age of Fishes”. The area is of paramount importance in having the greatest number and best preserved fossil specimens found anywhere in the world of the lobe-finned fishes that gave rise to the first four-legged, air-breathing terrestrial vertebrates - the tetrapodes.

We know this today because a two-million-year snapshot of life at the time is preserved in the remarkably rich fossil beds of the Escuminac Formation, which is exposed in a seaside cliff at Miguasha, on the south shore of the Gaspé facing Baie des Chaleurs. There are some 60 such Devonian period fossil sites around the world. But none matches Miguasha in abundance of specimens, quality of fossil preservation and representation of evolutionary events for vertebrates. It is the only Devonian site on the World Heritage List.

There is sufficient biodiversity at Miguasha - scores of species of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, algae and micro-organisms - for scientists to have constructed an almost complete picture of Devonian life. But it is the 21 species of fish fossils that made Miguasha famous, none more so than Eusthenopteron foordi, the “Prince of Miguasha,” whose limb-like fins and two-way gills-and-lungs respiratory system gave rise to the modern conception of evolution from fish to four-limbed, land-dwelling vertebrates, or tetrapods.

The Miguasha fossil beds were discovered in 1842. Starting in the 1880s, thousands of fossil specimens were collected and shipped to museums and universities around the world, helping to confirm the site’s scientific importance.