Mistaken Point

Mistaken Point is a Precambrian fossil site at the southeastern tip of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, protected today within a 5.7 square kilometer ecological reserve near St. John's. Its rock, part of the Avalonian terrane that formed when the ancient supercontinent Pannotia broke apart from Gondwana in the early Cambrian, preserves marine deposits from the Ediacaran period. The site holds one of the most diverse and well-preserved collections of Precambrian fossils in the world, and the Mistaken Point biota is considered the oldest known Ediacaran fossil assemblage, representing the oldest large and architecturally complex organisms yet found in Earth history and among the oldest known remnants of multicellular life. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on July 17, 2016, and the International Union of Geological Sciences named it one of its first 100 official geological heritage sites in October 2022, recognizing it as the best example in the world of an Ediacaran fossil community from when life first became large. This entity documents Mistaken Point specifically as a geological formation, an Ediacaran marine sedimentary sequence preserving early complex life.