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UNESCO World Heritage status is the highest honour that may be bestowed on a palaeontological site. In addition to heightening conservation status, it confers international recognition of a locality's ‘outstanding universal value’ and often triggers the release of substantial regional development funds. Despite these incentives it is, perhaps, not surprising that only a handful of fossil sites have successfully navigated the World Heritage selection process. In this feature, we draw on our recent experience of developing a World Heritage bid for the Pennsylvanian ‘Coal Age’ locality of Joggins, Nova Scotia. As well as demonstrating the huge significance of Joggins, we hope that our findings will provide valuable guidelines for the assessment of World Heritage fossil sites in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vegetation-induced sedimentary structures (VISS) are primary structures formed by the interaction of detrital sediment with in situ plants. VISS provide physical evidence of vegetation's fundamental role in mediating sediment accumulation and erosion in clastic depositional systems. Despite the abundance of modern VISS, descriptions from the ancient record are surprisingly rare. Analysis of fossil forests in floodplain strata of the Pennsylvanian Joggins Formation has identified seven types of VISS. Five hydrodynamic types comprise simple forms developed around a single plant (centroclinal cross-strata, scratch circles, upturned beds) and complex forms where structures have amalgamated between several plants (coalesced scour fills, scour-and-mound beds). Two types (mudstone-filled hollows, downturned beds) form by the decay of an entombed plant and represent infilling of an empty hollow and/or soft-sediment deformation. Hydrodynamic types are present in both dryland and wetland settings, whereas decay-related types occur only in dryland settings where the water table was perennially or periodically low. VISS represent significant accumulations of sediment and are present in a high proportion of Joggins Formation strata. The paucity of descriptions from the ancient record suggests that these structures have been overlooked or misinterpreted as strictly hydrodynamic. Recognition of VISS in early to middle Palaeozoic strata may provide an important insight into the distribution of early land plants in oxidizing environments where organic material was not preserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rich fossil assemblage discovered from the classic Pennsylvanian locality of Joggins, Nova Scotia, is here described for the first time. The 2 m-thick Hebert sandstone, within the lower Joggins Formation of early Langsettian age, is the most productive stratum at Joggins of terrestrial tetrapods and the pulmonate gastropod Dendropupa vetusta exclusive of the historic fossil forest locality of Dawson and Lyell, and the most productive Pennsylvanian locality in the world of the large unionoid bivalve genus Archanodon. Although the land snail–archanodontid bivalve–tetrapod assemblage of the Hebert Sandstone comprises a unique late Paleozoic terrestrial dryland biota, individual taxa were not endemic to drylands alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]