Canada is the second largest country in the world and has the world's longest coastline.

Lake Superior, with shores in Canada and the USA, is the world's largest freshwater lake.

The Great Bear Lake is the largest lake entirely within Canada.

The Niagara Falls consists of three separate waterfalls on the Niagara River.

Fossils found in Burgess Shale, British Columbia, date back over five hundred million years. Inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981, and later included in the World Heritage Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks, Burgess Shale is famous for the quantity and quality of fossils.

Fossils of lobe-finned fishes that became the first tetrapods (four-legged, air-breathing terrestrial vertebrates) were discovered in the Miguasha fossil beds in 1842. Miguasha Park, in Quebec, became a World Heritage site in 1999.

The 375 million year old fossil of a Tiktaalik, an extinct fish bridging the gap between land and sea animals, was found in Canada's Nunavut Territory in 2006.

Important fossil remains of dinosaurs have been found in Alberta. Dinosaur fossils can be seen in the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology.

Indigenous people of Canada include the Inuit who live in the north and the First Nations People who live further south.

Huron and Iroquois belonged to a single tribe in their early history.

The Micmac people were among the first indigenous people in North America to be converted to Christianity.

The French founded Quebec, now a World Heritage Site, at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

In 1763 Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War. Canada was ceded to Britain.

George Vancouver, a famous navigator, sailed with Captain James Cook on his voyage to the South Sea (1772-1775) and the Northwest Coast (1776-1780). The city of Vancouver and Vancouver Island were named after him.

The Hudson's Bay Company was almost two hundred years old when Canada became self-governing in 1867. The Company used to control one-third of present-day Canada.

In 1921 Sir Frederick Banting discovered insulin and its effects on diabetes at the University of Toronto. He was awarded a Nobel Prize.

Canada was given complete autonomy in 1931, gaining equality of status with Great Britain within the Commonwealth in 1947.

In 1965 the red maple leaf flag became the National Flag of Canada.

Reforms took place in 1982 and Canada was free to adopt its own Constitution.

Canada is a member of the Commonwealth.

A huge power cut hit Toronto, Ottawa and other parts of Ontario in August 2003; it also affected cities in the USA.

In October 2017 the Canadian government said that it would pay compensation to thousands of indigenous people who, in the past, were removed from their families as children and brought up by mainly white middle class families.