P.E.I. fossil hunter finds animal footprint estimated at 290 million years old

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This article was published 24/10/2025 (357 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CHARLOTTETOWN – An amateur fossil hunter in Prince Edward Island has found an animal footprint believed to be the oldest of its type ever discovered — at an estimated 290 million years old.

Patrick Brunet said he found the footprint, which is 25 centimetres wide, along the shore of Hillsborough Bay last spring. Brunet, from North Rustico, P.E.I., said he was doing his usual walkabout when he noticed a curved-shaped piece of rock that had fallen from about halfway up a cliff.

“I looked at it and thought, this is the biggest footprint I have ever seen,” Brunet said in an interview. “I didn’t recognize what kind of footprint it was, but immediately I knew this is something important.”

Brunet quickly contacted provincial officials along with John Calder, a geoscientist who advises the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation and Parks Canada.

Calder, who is also a part-time faculty member with the department of earth sciences at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, said he and his colleagues believe the footprint was made by a pareiasaur — a plant-eating reptile that weighed up to one tonne and roamed during the Permian Period, about 290 to 220 million years ago, before the age of dinosaurs.

“They were the biggest animals to roam the scene of the Permian,” said Calder. “These are big, bulky creatures that were easily able to fend off the largest predators of the time.”

A team of international scientists is working to confirm whether the footprint does indeed belong to a pareiasaur. To date, Calder said that two world-renowned paleontologists have agreed with his interpretation of the footprint, although more scientific vetting is needed. 

Once the study is completed, the fossil will be returned to the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation where it will become part of the provincial collection.

Calder said the Island’s red rocks hold the best fossilized record of life on land for the Permian period in Canada. 

“The Permian is a pivotal time when the world went through extreme global climate change and things started drying out,” he said. “We went from humid and tropical to a more arid world and reptiles were in the right place at the right time as far as evolution goes.”

While unfortunate, he said constant coastal erosion due to sea level rise in P.E.I. has proven a boon to the understanding of the Island’s fossil record. “With continuing coastal erosion we are going to find more (fossils). It’s inevitable, absolutely it will be the case,” said Calder.

But it’s also a mixed bag because extreme weather events linked to climate change — like Hurricane Fiona, which battered the Island’s coast in September 2022 — tend to “destroy more than they reveal,” he said.

Meanwhile, Calder credits Brunet with doing more to uncover the fossil record of the Island than any other person.

For his part, the 49-year-old Brunet said he has been fascinated by fossils since childhood and a Grade 4 class field trip with a local geologist. He said he began to search across the province in earnest in 2020 after reading Calder’s book, “Island at the Centre of the World: The Geological Heritage of Prince Edward Island.”

“It explained about all of the fossil finds and I was intrigued with the part of the book that says the fossils are out there you just have to hunt to find them,” Brunet said. “It (fossil hunting) connects me to my childhood and now it’s about this growing passion and curiosity.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 24, 2025.

— By Keith Doucette in Halifax