Geology Collection

The Geology Collections of the Nova Scotia Museum tell the labyrinthine story of the geological history of the province through representative rocks, minerals, gemstones, and fossils (vertebrate, invertebrate, palaeobotanical and traces). The Geology Collections also include comparative rocks, minerals, gemstones, meteorites and fossils from across Canada and around the world. Nova Scotia has a complex geological history that extends back over a billion years through geological time, recording the coming together of three ancient continents to form the modern landscape of today with which we are so familiar.

Highlights of the collections include Canada’s oldest dinosaurs, the world’s smallest dinosaur footprints, the world’s oldest reptile, the world’s oldest land snail, fossil trackways that are the world’s earliest evidence of herding behaviour in vertebrates, fossils of some the world’s first vertebrates to walk on land, fossils trees of ancient forests, fossils of some of our earliest ancestors – protomammals – that are not preserved anywhere else in the world,  fossils from an Ice Age landscape including and adult and baby male mastodon and a soft-bodied Painted Turtle hatchling, exquisite specimens of gold, spectacular specimens of agate and zeolites.