The reserve is home to the namesake Mistaken Point Formation, which contains one of the most diverse and well-preserved collections of Precambrian fossils in the world.

Sailors making this error would turn north, thinking they had reached Cape Race Harbour, and immediately run into treacherous rocks.

The first fossil to be found in the area, Fractofusus misrai, was discovered in June 1967 by Shiva Balak Misra, an Indian graduate student studying geology at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[9] It formed in the early Cambrian when Pannotia broke from Gondwana (now South America, Africa, Antarctica, and Australia).

In respect of Mistaken Point being 'the best example in the world of an Edicaran fossil community where life first got big and metazoan communities bloomed', the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) included the 'Ediacaran fossil site of Mistaken Point' in its assemblage of 100 'geological heritage sites' around the world in a listing published in October 2022.