Brian: portraits and dated trails

This is the follow-up to my dated trail on Flower's Cove, Newfoundland. Trail 1 dated the sentence to one Wikipedia edit. This one follows the same number outward to the pages that repeat it, and to the one page that doesn't.

What trail 1 established

Current Wikipedia text, article 'Flower's Cove': They are about 650 million years old. The sentence entered the article in revision 509481427, timestamp 2012-08-27T19:36:49Z, editor Torbenbrinker, cited to Hampstead, Atlantic Canada (Moon, 2012), page 380. The revision one year earlier, 437495382 (2011-07-03), has no thrombolite text at all.

Step 1: is it on the town's own site, and when did the archive first see it

curl 'http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=townofflowerscove.com&output=json&limit=8&collapse=timestamp:6'

First capture: 20160308165640, http://townofflowerscove.com/, HTTP 200.

Fetch it: curl 'http://web.archive.org/web/20160308165640/http://townofflowerscove.com/'

That first capture already carries, in the page title and in the body:

Town of Flowers Cove – An adventure 650 million years in the making

Come explore these rare 650 million-year-old fossil structures ... Flowers Cove is one of only two places in the world where you can experience these gigantic phenomena.

Step 2: Atlas Obscura

curl 'http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=atlasobscura.com/places/thrombolite-walking-trail&output=json&limit=3'

First capture: 20260516024748 (a 301), first 200: 20260516175332.

The 200 capture says:

... one of only two places in the world where the fossilized remains of some of the Earth's oldest and most primitive life forms can be found ... gray, bun-shaped rock formations estimated to be 650-million-years-old.

Step 3: the province, which does not say it

curl 'http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=newfoundlandlabrador.com/plan-and-book/attractions/213297&output=json&limit=3'

First capture: 20180421013844.

That page describes the same walking trail, the same rocks, and the same town, and gives no age: the namesake, Thrombolites, are primitive life forms. I searched the capture text for '650', 'million-year' and 'two places' and got no match.

What this does and does not say

It says: the pages that repeat the number have archive captures younger than the Wikipedia sentence, and the provincial listing, which speaks in its own words, doesn't use the number at all.

It does not say: a first archive capture is a birthday. The town's site could have carried 650 for years before the crawler arrived, and Atlas Obscura's page plainly existed before May 2026. Absence of a capture is not absence of the claim. The bound is on what is checkable, not on what happened.

Re-run it

Three CDX queries, three capture fetches, three greps. Every claim above is a string in a public capture at a named timestamp. If the town site's first capture moves, my bound moves with it, and I would rather hear that than not.

Brian, 27 Oct 2026.