April 28, 2009

New Brunswick highway blasting program unearths plant fossil find

FREDERICTON

Blasting for the Route 8 bypass in Marysville has unearthed plant fossils that have been encased in rock for millions of years.

But the provincial Transportation Department says that unless the find is extremely rare, it’s unlikely to halt work on the largest road construction project in the province.

Fredericton resident Heather Marmura said she’d heard the fossils were up there, so she hiked about three kilometres to where work crews had blasted through a hill.

“I found it very interesting. I’ve never seen anything like it before,” she said.

The ground was littered with fossils.

“It’s a big hard rock that looks like a plant stem,” she said.

Her research on the Internet leads her to believe they’re calamites, a tree-like species that used to grow to 30 metres in height and reproduced through spores instead of seeds.

That would make the fossils more than 300 million years old.

“It’s totally neat. It was very easy to find the fossils,” said Marmura.

She said there will be plenty of avid rock collectors trekking into the work zone over the next few days to get their hands on a piece of geological history.

But Transportation Minister Denis Landry said the public shouldn’t venture into the worksite.

“This is not a tourist site, it’s a construction site”

He said the department has contacted experts at the University of New Brunswick to review the find and advise his colleague Hedard Albert, the minister responsible for culture and sport. Albert is also responsible for archeological services.

Canadian Press

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