Quebec’s Anticosti Island recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site

By Stephane Blais THE CANADIAN PRESS MONTREAL-Ten years after Quebec’s government wanted to launch oil and gas exploration on Anticosti Island, the picturesque territory in the Gulf of St. Lawrence has been added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The agency’s world heritage committee, which says fossil fuel exploration or exploitation is incompatible with heritage status _ announced Tuesday that Anticosti Island is being formally recognized on the United Nations’s list of places with outstanding universal value to humanity. According to UNESCO’s website, Quebec’s largest island is “the most complete and best preserved paleontological record of the first mass extinction of animal life, 447-437 million years ago.” It says world-class scientists will be able to study what it describes as the “the best-preserved fossil record of marine life…

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