Fossils on Craigleith Beach

With our grandson visiting it seemed like a good time to finally go and check out the fossils said to be common along the Georgian Bay shoreline at Craigleith Provincial Park.  It turned out to be even easier than I expected - and the parents were much more excited about the fossils than the grandson!

The most common type of fossils found here, right along the shoreline, are trilobites like these 3, picked up in just a few minutes of looking.  These are the most commonly found tail sections of the trilobites, which have a larger body than these fossils suggest.  These fossils are about 1 - 1.5 inches across.

While lots can be found on broken bits of rock as above, this one was embedded in the solid bedrock, and the picture was taken through about 2 inches of water.  The Lindsay Formation bedrock forms hard flat shelving limestone along the shore here.

And this piece of rock illustrates well how the fossils are often found, embedded together, dozens of them visible in the same piece of limestone. There are small fragments of other types of fossils here too.

We did find one other type of fossil here, I think a form of pelecypod shell. These rocks are from the Ordovician Era, about 450 million years ago, when most of the life on earth was in the sea, and these invertebrates underwent rapid evolution.  Only primitive land plants existed, and as yet no fish.  So creatures like these organisms were the dominant form of life.

This is the flat shelving limestone of the shore at this location, labelled the Lindsay Formation, at the same location where the pictures of Georgian Bay posted last Friday were taken.  Our fossil expedition was at the public road allowance just west of Craigleith Provincial Park.  There is also plenty of shoreline to walk within the park itself.

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