Nature
Marine mammals include seals and porpoises. Fish include bass, and flounder; lobster, crab, mussel, and clam are common. Many types of seaweed, sponges, worms, seajellys and more are also found. Birds include sandpipers, terns (visitors only), eagles, falcons, seagulls, herons, and kingfishers.
Fossils are found near Parrsboro, Blue Beach and other areas along the Avon River. Rarely, fossils have been found at Evangeline Beach, Burntcoat Head, and other locations. These fossils include various shells (brachiopods, molluscs), sponges, trees, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs. Trace fossils include vertebrate footprints, fish fin-tracks, invertebrate trackways (ex. scorpions at Blue Beach), raindrop inprints, and wave ripples. They range from the beginning of the Carboniferous to the Jurassic. They were deposited when the region was warm and tropical, later when it was covered by a shallow sea, and later still when it was a desert.
Minerals include a variety zeolites from the basalt cliffs at Cape Split, the area around Parrsboro, Five Islands and Cap D'Or. These include Nova Scotia's provincial mineral stilbite, as well as heulandite, analcime, chabazite, gmelinite, natrolite and thomsonite. Other minerals found in the basalts include calcite, magnetite, copper, and quartz (often as amethyst). Beautiful agate is also found. In the sedimentary rocks, gypsum is commonly found at Blomidon, Clarke Head, and near Windsor in both the colorless variety (selenite) and the fibrous variety (satin spar), the latter sometimes being bright orange. Other minerals from the sedimentary rocks include pyrite, calcite, barite, manganite, and pyrolusite. Small amounts of fluorite, celestite, howlite have also been found at Cheverie.
Read more about this topic: Minas Basin
Famous quotes containing the word nature:
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as at present; that men were but men then as well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better than they are now.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.”
—Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)