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This is part of the headframe and processing structure at Albert Mines. This
is about all that's left of a community that was extremely busy in the
late eighteen hundreds.
It was where that they mined albertite. Albertite is a bitumen named after
Albert County where it was found,
and it was used in the production of kerosene.
Abraham Gesner, the first Provincial Geologist in New Brunswick is often
credited with developing a process to distill kerosene, he is often
thought of as a founder of the modern petroleum industry.
Albert Mines has been famous for albertite but it's also well known because of the fish
fossils that have been found here in the shales.
These are oil shales that were deposited at the bottom of a lake about three hundred
and fifty million years ago,
and have produced some really interesting fossils, very few plants, but lots of fish.
The fish are remains of palaeoniscid fish, these are early bony fish.
In the Albert formation shales, complete specimens of palaeoniscid fish
have been found although they are quite rare.
It's more common when you split open the shales to find fragments of fish,
or quite often isolated scales that are in coprolites.
It's hard to imagine that foundations like this are all that left of a once
busy community. If you look at some of the archival photographs of this place,
there was a church here, a school, a mine managers house, a headframe that you can
see in the picture, which is where I am probably sitting,
and community buildings for the workers who lived here.