Anticosti, a remote, sparsely-inhabited island in the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence, is like a slice of cake tipped onto a plate, exposing all of its layers at once. On the north coast, the Vauréal slices through this geological confection like a knife, plunging from a stunted tangle of boreal forest to the canyon below before draining into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Fossils here and at other sites have lured paleontologists for a century. Anticosti has other claims to fame — notably its deer population and its bizarre period as a French chocolate magnate’s private playground — but ultimately it is these visible snapshots of ancient Earth that earned the island a coveted designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023.

I’ve come to Anticosti to see for myself why this narrow, wild wedge of land deserves to rank among our planet’s great sites of human and natural heritage — places like the pyramids of Egypt, the Serengeti and the Great Barrier Reef. The Innu call it Notiskuan, translated as “where bears are hunted,” while the Mi’kmaq call it Natogostec, “land of before,” possibly a reference to its position at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. But as I’m learning, Anticosti lives up to its Mi’kmaq name in another way, offering tantalizing glimpses at a time before virtually all of life on Earth as we know it today existed.

The next day, crossing north to south from McDonald to Chicotte-la-Mer, we travel from one end of the Earth’s first mass extinction to the other. The drive takes nearly two hours, over rippling hills like ocean swells. Glancing in the rear-view mirror at the clouds kicked up by the truck tires, I’m reminded of what a clerk at Port-Menier’s only grocery store told me: “On Anticosti, the road comes with dust.” The hiss of loose gravel under the tires reminds me of the swish of water off a boat’s bow.

The water in the Chicotte River is low but perfectly clear, the stone sides of the channel sculpted into polished organic art. Water sways and swirls in shades of green. On the riverbank, I spot fossils etched into the water-worn rocks like ancient runes on a tablet.

Walking about the riverbed, we meet Myriam Tessier and Claude Lachance. Always in search of places where the road ends, the retired couple is exploring the island in their camper van. In Rimouski, they loaded the van into a shipping container and onto the MV Bella Desgagnés, the cargo-passenger ship that supplies communities at a dozen small ports along Quebec’s Lower North Shore. At Port-Menier, a crane plucked their camper from the ship and placed it on the dock.

“It’s very wild here,” says Tessier. “It was like a dream to complete what we wanted to see.” Lachance declares the Chicotte Canyon hike one of their favourite activities because, unlike at Vauréal, there’s no viewing platform, so it seems even wilder.

Three kilometres west at Les Caps, coastal erosion has dug shallow caves and exposed shelves of stone. Here, so thick are the cross-sections with fossils, it’s as if the stone is made of nothing but fossilized corals, shells and other compressed marine life.

Just as Pineault and others value what might be considered a plague of deer anywhere else, they also see the island’s dangerous reefs differently. More than 400 ships have foundered on these shores, earning Anticosti the nickname Graveyard of the Gulf. According to Pineault, early sailors called it l’île maudite (cursed island). Near Auberge McDonald, steep wooden stairs lead to the MV Wilcox, a wrecked former minesweeper, its bow heavily fortified with steel. The hulk, split open like a slain deer, slumps under its own weight, with spruce windfalls scattered across its bulk. At Pointe-Ouest, 15 kilometres from Port-Menier, the fishing trawler Calou rests in a nest of gravel where it was wrecked in 1982.

Anticosti’s deserved reputation for danger discouraged settlement and development, but the reefs have also insulated the island from the rapid erosion reshaping Côte-Nord, the Quebec mainland opposite Anticosti’s northern shore. When winter storms roar out of the northeast, the deer migrate south to find shelter and feed on seaweed that washes up on the reefs. On our travels around the island, we spot deer feeding far out on the shoals at low tide.

After Henri Menier’s death in 1913, his brother Gaston struggled to make his ownership of Anticosti profitable. As a last resort, the Meniers’ emissary, Georges Martin-Zédé, came up with an elaborate tourism plan that he never had a chance to implement before Gaston sold Anticosti to a pulp and paper company in 1926. Martin-Zédé’s plan foreshadowed what the island offers today and inspired Pineault to pursue the UNESCO nomination.

Pineault assembled a team of 40, including representatives from the Innu communities of Ekuanitshit and Nutashkuan on the mainland and the Quebec government. He appointed André Desrochers, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, scientific director for the nomination.

“Anticosti is the fossils,” says Pineault, “but it’s also the shipwrecks, the story of the Indigenous people. It’s layer upon layer upon layer.” Pineault imagined Menier would also be a key part of the bid, but, in the end, it was the fossil record alone that won the day. In a global analysis of sites with fossils dating to Earth’s first mass extinction, Anticosti easily came out on top. The island has the most complete and abundant fossiliferous record of that critical 10 million years of Earth history between 447 and 437 million years ago.

Desrochers calls Anticosti a huge laboratory. He’s made countless visits, beginning with his first in 1977 as a graduate student studying why those prehistoric creatures thrived and faltered. A drop in ocean oxygen levels likely asphyxiated most marine life; however, Desrochers says the full explanation is as layered as everything else about Anticosti. “We all agree that the Ordovician mass extinction is actually a succession of events, but it’s a very hot topic of research right now.”