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IT’S FREEZING out. The rocks are covered in ice, making walking treacherous, but my companion on this Saturday morning excursion to the world-famous Joggins fossil cliffs seems oblivious to the conditions.

Instead, he moves about nimbly, his eyes fastened on the cliffs that tower above us. Every now and then, he darts up to the cliff face for a closer look at the stony wall that for more than a century has revealed bit by bit what the world was like 350 million years ago.

Meet Brian Hebert, 29, of nearby Lower Cove, the amateur paleontologist the experts like to have with them as they attempt to unearth more clues about the Coal Age from these ancient cliffs.

"Brian has this uncanny ability to discover fossils, and not regular fossils, but important fossils," Mike Rygel, an assistant professor at the Potsdam College, State University of New York, said in an interview.

"I got my PhD for my work at Joggins. I’ve worked there since 2001 and for one year, I was there every day, yet I am still unable to do what he does. . . . We’d be walking along at a normal clip, and he’d pick something out, something that I had just walked right by.

"I expect he has been able to develop that skill because he has lived and played around those cliffs all of his life."

John Calder, a geologist with a PhD who works with the provincial Natural Resources Department, said almost exactly the same thing in a separate interview.

"Very few have the eye that Brian has," Calder said with a touch of reverence. "He has an incredible gift of being able to recognize significant fossils that trained paleontologists will walk right by. And he knows the difference between what is common and what is uncommon."

Finding the fossils is only part of Hebert’s ability, the two scientists say.

"He goes way beyond a normal amateur collector," said Calder, a leading expert on the cliffs. "A normal collector finds a fossil and might learn its name, but Brian not only needs to know its name, but how the fossil fits into the fossil record, what it means in the grander scheme of things."

"He has a vast knowledge of what occurred here at Joggins, and most of that is self-taught," added Rygel. "That’s not an easy thing to do. His ability to teach himself is as astounding as his ability to communicate easily with expert geologists, paleontologists, paleobotanists."

When told of those comments, Hebert blushes but says he has a passion to know everything there is to know about the fossils he finds. That passion was there from the beginning.

"I was 16, (and) my father (also named Brian) and I were walking on the Lower Cove beach when I found my first fossil. We found it in a rock and speculated what it could be. I remember that I was driven to know what it was, so I got the only book the River Hebert library had on Joggins fossils and looked it up. It turned out to be the root of a plant."


THAT experience hooked him.

"The book had several pictures of fossils, mostly plants, from Joggins. I decided then and there that I’d find every one of them," he recalled. "I’d go to the beach every day and bring home fossils. By the end of the summer, I had so many fossils on my porch that it was sagging."

His search for knowledge also continued. He had the library bring in more and more books. He became fascinated with Sir William Dawson’s Acadian Geology. (It was Dawson and his partner, Sir Charles Lyell, who discovered the Joggins fossil cliffs in the late 1800s.) It’s a thick book that wasn’t written with the casual reader in mind. Rather, it is a detailed record of what Dawson and his partner found as they explored this area’s geology.

"Once I understood it — and it took more than one reading before I did understand it — I could see in the rock what Dawson was speaking about. I knew then and there that it was important to keep detailed records on where I found a fossil. I still have the records from the first fossils I found and I continue to keep detailed records."

The quest for knowledge was enhanced when Hebert met Calder for the first time.

"I was just ending Grade 9. Me and my friends were on the beach, and we saw these guys with hard hats. I showed John a fossil trackway I’d found only moments before and I remember he was amazed by it. That encouraged me, and John’s response to a kid’s questions made me want to learn even more."

Calder remembers that meeting.

"But what I remember more was that he could already talk to me easily about the fossils. That was amazing in someone so young."

Calder also remembers when he introduced Hebert to Andrew Scott, a world-renowned paleobotanist from England.

"Brian was still in high school when I brought Andrew to his home. He stunned us when he showed us a fossil and told us he believed it was an ancient fish. He really stunned us when he produced a paper he’d found that described his discovery. How a kid from Lower Joggins could put that all together was beyond us."

Hebert doesn’t know where his passion comes from, but he does know where his ability to find fossils came from.

"My dad taught me," he says, gently tapping a rock that he thinks has potential.

"Well, he didn’t teach me how to find fossils but he did teach me all about the woods: how to find tracks of animals and identify them from their track; how to determine what the animal has eaten by looking at his droppings; what the bones in the forest mean.

"It’s the same thing when you walk on the beach. You look for the trackways, the droppings and the bones. They’re there just like they are in the forest except they’re in stone."

He tosses the rock aside with a shake of the head.

"Nothing there. That happens sometimes," he says, smiling.


CALDER introduced the young man to many other of the world’s leading paleontologists and geologists like Howard Falcon Lang, Jennifer Clack and Martin Gibling, all from England. Meeting and working with these people and a host of others increased his desire to learn more and to make more discoveries.

Calder and Rygel are glad he’s still looking because some of his finds have helped scientists get a better understanding of Joggins’s prehistoric environment.

Among the items he’s found are 11 large fossilized clams, more than 100 fossilized land snails known as dendropupa, several ribs and leg bones of a small amphibian known as dendrerpeton and two very small jaws from a creature known as a microsaur, the smallest vertebrate from that period.

In addition, he’s found the pelvis bone and some teeth for a two- to three-metre-long carnivorous tetrapod that was perhaps the largest creature from that era. Calder has nicknamed it Rex.

"Each of these discoveries by themselves are important because they give scientists some insight into each of these individual organisms," Rygel said. "But because he kept records of where they were found in the rock and which beds they came from, we are able to get a better picture of what the environment of Joggins was like."

Prior to these discoveries, Joggins was almost always described as a dense jungle.

"But that changed because all of these discoveries of Brian’s were found close together in a layer of sandstone that no one else had ever found anything in. It told us these animals lived in an ecosystem that forced them to live in close proximity, similar to the way animals are forced together in dryland waterhole ecosystems that exist in places like Australia today," Calder said. "It gave us a new picture of what Joggins was like during the Pennsylvanian period."

Hebert seems bashful when he hears how much credit the experts give him for helping to develop this new understanding of the ancient climate, but he’s quick to acknowledge that it is such discoveries that keep him combing the cliffs.

"I know there is more out there. It’s what drives me to come out here, even on days like today when it’s freezing out," he says, turning his undivided attention to the cliffs once again.
www.topix.com/science/paleontology