Calling all Musicians and Entertainers...

Mishra's Dream performing at our United Nations Day event in October 2008


The Joggins Fossil Institute hosts a number of events throughout the year for the local community, corporate clients and family celebrations.

The province of Nova Scotia holds some of the most unique musical talents in Canada and we are looking for some of those talented Nova Scotians, who we can call upon to provide music or entertainment for our events.

We are specifically looking for buskers who can walk around the site and entertain our visitors as they picnic or enjoy our Sunday afternoon barbeques and other musical talents, who can play background music for formal functions and cocktail evenings.

How to Apply
Please send us a link to your web site, MySpace, Facebook or Youtube pages, where we can view you perform. You can also send us a CD of your music or a video of you performing.
Please tell us what your rates are per hour/event.

Please contact Fran Hubbard, Catering Supervisor or Melanie Cookson-Carter Operations Coordinator on 902-251-2727 or email theroundhouse@jogginsfossilcliffs.net

We are on the look out for a talented Cook!

Do you, or someone you know, have experience working in a busy catering environment? Are you or they looking for a job, which will challenge, in a supportive and exciting environment?

Great!

We are actively seeking an experienced Cook to work in our Roundhouse Cafe over the summer months. The right candidate must be able to keep cool under pressure, be able to create excellent food and have top notch customer care skills.

If you think you have what it takes, find out more on our website
http://www.jogginsfossilcliffs.net/institute/jobs/ The new closing date is 1st June at 4:00pm.

If you would like to have an informal chat with Fran Hubbard, our Catering Supervisor, please give her a call on 902-251-2727.

Outpost Magazine in search of fossils

May/June's edition of Outpost Magazine has a fantastic article by Andrea Grant, travel writer, which features her visit to the Bay of Fundy last year.

Andrea is a very talented writer, who manages to capture the wonderful essence of the local environment, specifically the richness of its geological and paleontological heritage.

Andrea accompanied Brian on a tour of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs back in 2008, prior to our inscription onto the World Heritage List and was impressed with his passion for the fossils of Joggins. She was also mesmerised by the promise of perpetual discovery and the opportunity to be the first human to ever see a freshly exposed fossil.

Outpost is a magazine, published six times a year and has a dedicated readership who search for something more than a vacation, they search for experiences and unique opportunities, which will satisfy their wanderlust.

Follow this link for more information on Outpost Magazine.

Community Clean-up Day 2009

It was the hottest day of the year so far and over 120 children and adults were out on the streets and beach of Joggins helping us with our first annual Community Clean-up Day.

The students, teachers and chaperones from the River Hebert Elementary School along with our team worked tirelessly to help ensure that our backyard is garbage and litter-free.

The volunteers collected everything from candy wrappers to clothing and we hope that participating in the event will help to show the next generation the importance of community pride and environmental stewardship.
To reward the willing volunteers we provided a barbeque and cool drinks. The local elementary school is a wonderful supporter of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs and we would like to pass on our sincere thanks to Luanne Berry and her marvelous team and children for their support and help.

We would like to make this an annual event and one, which the whole community can participate in and be encouraged that the Joggins Fossil Institute is helping them to take care of their own backyard.

All of the garbage collected was sorted and taken to the dump, where it would be recycled. Here are some 'green facts' to help you understand why we take environmental stewardship very seriously:

Recycling all of your home's waste newsprint, cardboard, glass and metal can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 400 kg a year.-Earth Care

The first PET (plastic) bottle was recycled in 1977.-The National Association of PET Container Resources

Incinerating 10,000 tonnes of waste creates 1 job, landfilling the same amount creates 6 jobs, recycling the same 10,000 tonnes creates 36 jobs.-Clean Nova Scotia

In a lifetime, the average North American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage. A 68 kg adult will leave a legacy of 40,825 kg of trash.-Natural Resources Canada

The evolution of the Joggins Fossil Centre

Don Reid is an extraordinary man.

In the 1980s, the former Joggins coal miner operated a private fossil centre in his own backyard. Using the old wooden office building from the Joggins Coal Mine, he "sliced off the top floor" (his words) and turned it into his single-storey fossil exhibition gallery, which housed his impressive collection of Joggins fossils.

The success of this first make-shift centre led on to the development of what is known locally as the "log building", which is still located on Main Street but now houses a local history exhibition. This centre and Don's enthusiasm for interpreting the fossils to visitors was the catalyst for the development of the new, 21st century centre here atop the cliffs in everyone's backyard, which seems a fitting conclusion thus far to the evolution of the Joggins Fossil Centre.

Don's collection has served as the most important census of the biodiversity of the site and his altruistic collaboration with the scientists earned from them the title "Keeper of the Cliffs". Don was recently awarded the Paul Harris Fellowship by Rotary International.

We are pleased to confirm that Don is still very much a figure in the new centre and will be spending more time with us this season, enhancing his celebrity status! Don's anecdotal presentations on the fossils, how and where they were found and his memories of the cliffs of Joggins provides a valuable extra dimension to the visitor experience.

NASA beams back satellite images of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs

Check out this amazing link to NASA's recent image collected of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs and posted as Image of the Day on 10th May, on their earthobservatory website.

Thanks to everyone who kindly sent us the link. Why not set up Google alerts for the Joggins Fossil Cliffs and you can keep up to date with the latest info and news, covering Joggins from all over the world.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=38435&src=eoa-iotd

We've got the Wow Factor

Join us at the Joggins Fossil Centre for a WowFactor! Training Event
20th May 2009, 1:00pm

WOWfactor! Customer Service Training explores how people, place and process combine to create WOW experiences. Training becomes a self-discovery adventure as servers develop the ability to generate meaningful connections between their product and their guests.

Workshop participants learn to recognize when and how guests are pushed and pinched away from WOW! and how to change this.Staff who are new to the service industry receive key tips for achieving truly memorable and personally satisfying service delivery. Seasoned tourism staff emerges inspired & energized from these innovative, interactive sessions.

All staff receive a fresh insight into the complexities of service excellence and the motivation to WOW!

The cost is only $40.00 per person, including afternoon refreshments

Please call 902-251-2727 to reserve your places.

There is (apparently) always a rational explanation!

I look out of my office window every day (well, I have to take a break from all of this work sometimes) across the Bay of Fundy and its huge expanse of rising and falling tides. Every day I see some signs of life, usually in the air or on the ground.

Bald eagles swoop and dive over the cliffs, coming to rest upon Coalmine Point. Groundhogs, who have made their burrows inside the old mine shafts and our local fox, usually followed closely by a local beagle!

I have yet to see signs of life emerge from the waters but recently we have had reports of a creature with a dorsal fin close to the beach. We even had reports that this creature was seen up the local tidal river in the town of River Hebert.

Yesterday, two of our team, Liz and Cathy returned from the beach thrilled by their sighting of the creature close to the beach and then further along.


We have learned today that our friendly visitor is most likely to be a harbour porpoise. Now there is a small part of me disappointed that we don't have our very own mystical beast, like the Loch Ness Monster or the Beast of Bodmin or even Sasquatch, but I am still thrilled to be able to look out of my office window and there I might see my first sighting of a porpoise.

Mother's Day Brunch a Huge Success

We have had a wonderful morning, serving our delicious brunch to all of our visiting mothers and their families. We were certainly busier than expected but with the awesome smells eminating from our kitchen I'm not surprised. They must have drifted up Main Street and enticed many of the locals.

Our Catering Supervisor Fran, is a visionary who created some delicious food from eggs benedict with salmon to Nova Scotian chowder, crepes with strawberries, whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce to breakfast favourites of hash browns and bangers (sausages...hey I'm from England!).

The quilt exhibition was a huge success of course and this will run until Sunday 17th May.

Keep a watch out for news on our Father's Day Barbeque Buffet. We will be posting information on this event here soon.

Nova Scotian artist Carol Whitcombe CSPWC delivers some breathtaking work to Joggins

When Carol Whitcombe called last season to say she wanted to be a part of our United Nations Day provincial artist and artisan's exhibition of work, little did we know just what a talented woman and great friend to the Joggins Fossil Cliffs Carol would turn out to be.

Carol visited today to bring along her latest pieces, which feature the cliffs of Joggins. Carol's present muse is her love for the features of the coastal rock formations and how the light of the day plays upon the rocks and fissures.

I had goosebumps when Carol revealed her first piece, one which has taken her over three months. Hidden Treasures is a masterpiece, which showcases Carol's truly unique talent for taking her three dimensional inspiration and transplanting this in its very minute details onto paper.

The other two pieces, Joggins Sunset Cliffs and Sunset's Glow on Joggins Beach induced the same reaction and I had to look closer to make sure that Carol wasn't trying to "pull one over" with photographs but, no.

These one of a kind, original paintings are for sale at the centre and Carol has kindly offered to make a donation to the Joggins Fossil Institute from their sale.

We will also be selling limited edition matted prints, which will be in the Green Crow Gift Shop and Gallery soon.

Quilts and vaulted ceilings...that's a recipe for teamwork!

The team had fun on Friday as they figured out how to display the quilts, that have been lent to the Institute by local craftswomen and quilting circles, for our Exhibition of Quilts, which is due to start tomorrow, Sunday 10th May (Mother's Day).

We have some mighty high ceilings in our meeting space, where the quilts will be on display. We also have a fabulous team, who have both a great head for heights and some ingenious methods of getting them up there!

Kudos to everyone involved with setting up the exhibition and particularly to those ladies (and I say ladies because it actually is all work from women) who have some awe-inspiring needlework and creative design skills.

If you haven't yet booked to bring your mother to our Mother's Day Brunch on Sunday (10:30am - 1:30pm) you will need to book soon as we are filling up quickly. Please call Fran on 902-251-2727 ext 230 to make your reservation.

Province contributes to the development of our play facilities

Picture L to R: Murray Scott MLA, JFI Scientist Melissa Grey PhD and Gerald Read, Chairman of the JFI Board

Murray Scott paid us a visit yesterday and if that wasn't great enough, he came with a cheque in his hand.

The Hon. Murray Scott, MLA for Cumberland South, Minister of Economic and Rural Development for Nova Scotia and Minister responsible for Nova Scotia Business Inc. has always been a strong supporter for the Joggins Fossil Cliffs development and he was thrilled to be able to hand over a cheque for the development of the play facilities (outdoor playground) at the centre.

The Joggins Fossil Institute applied for provincial funding to help us to develop a new playground on-site. This playground will be an important community and visitor resource, which will replace the old playground on Hurley Road in Joggins.

The design and development of the site will be over two years and the $10,500 ($5,500 in 2009-10 and $5000 in 2010-11) funding was drawn down from the Government of Nova Scotia's Recreation Facility Development Grant Program that is administered through the Department of Health Promotion and Protection (Minister Pat Dunn).

Thanks Nova Scotia for once again supporting the Joggins Fossil Institute and digging deep for your 300,000,000 year old backyard!

Special Event Notice - Mother's Day 2009

SPECIAL EVENT NOTICE

Mother’s Day Brunch & Opening of our Spring Exhibition of Quilts

Sunday May 10th, 2009
10:30am – 1:30pm

Menu includes: Seafood Chowder, Salmon Eggs Benedict, Scrambled Eggs and Bacon Crepes with Cheddar Maple Cream Sauce, Fresh Fruit Crepes with Whipped Cream and Chocolate Rose Sauce, Lasagne & Caesar Salad, Muffins, Croissants, Cheese Platter, Fruit Salad, Coffee & Tea

Adults $12.50
Children $6.25

The Exhibion of quilts will continue all week until 17th May and shows off the wonderful talents of a number of local women and regional quilting circles.

Call 902-251-2727 for more information.

Joggins Fossil Cliffs - Are you a fan yet?

Firstly back to our stigmaria root. IF (and it is a big if) this root falls from the cliff in one piece then it will certainly be the largest specimen we have in our collection. Others have been found in the past, which outrun this one in length but retaining them in one piece is almost impossible due to the fragile and brittle nature of the fossils. We shall be watching it closely though.

Have you been on Facebook recently? If you haven't then you won't know that you can become a fan of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs. In fact, since we signed up three days ago we already have 155 fans. If we keep this up we will have 20,000 fans by this time next year.

Facebook is a great way to enter discussions and debates and to virtually meet with other visitors and fans. If you haven't become a fan yet why not sign up and see what all of the fuss is about.

Forms of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and even this blog are an important resource for organisations such as the Joggins Fossil Institute to be able to keep visitors and researchers as current as possible with discoveries, events and news from the site. We hope that you find it useful and if you aren't already following this blog why not start following it today. All you need is a current email address and you can make comment or post how your visit went.

Oh and if when you arrive at our admissions desk and mention that you are a facebook friend, we will give you $1.00 off your admission fee and 5% discount off any gift shop purchases. Now we can't say fairer than that can we? *

Watch this space for news on our upcoming quilting exhibition and Mother's Day Brunch.

*offer valid for May to October 2009