The Burgess Shale is a fossil-bearing deposit located in the Canadian Rockies of southwestern British Columbia. It is notable for the exceptional preservation of the soft parts of its fossils. The rock formation is dated to the Middle Cambrian Period, and documents an important stage in early animal evolution.
In 1909, Charles Doolittle Walcott, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered the first fossils in what would later be known as the Burgess Shale. Walcott was exploring the Canadian Rockies on behalf of the Smithsonian when he came across a shale outcrop near Mount Stephen in British Columbia. He collected over 65,000 specimens from this initial find, which he shipped back to Washington DC for further study.
It wasn’t until more than 50 years later that scientists began to appreciate the significance of Walcott’s discovery. In 1965, Harry Whittington from Cambridge University re-examined some of Walcott’s specimens and realized that they represented a previously unknown variety of soft-bodied creature. This prompted Whittington and his colleague Derek Briggs to carry out a more detailed study of the fossils from Mount Stephen – work that eventually led to the recognition ofthe exceptional preservation found in these rocks.
Burgess Shale Fossils: An Overview
Most people are familiar with fossils that show only bones or shells – often just partial remains preserved by chance after millennia underground. The Burgess Shale presents something very different: here we see creatures whose bodies were almost entirely composed of flesh (soft tissue), yet which have been preserved down to minute details such as eyes and gills . Even delicate features such as muscle fibers sometimes remain intact! This level of detail is unparalleled anywhere else in Earth’s fossil record and provides invaluable insights into both how these animals lived their lives and how they fit into broader patternsof early animal evolution . Because they are so well preserved, Burgess Shale fossils can tell us not only what an animal looked like but also how it moved , what it ate , and even how its nervous system was arranged . In short, these extraordinary fossils offer a rare glimpse “underneaththe hood” at some critical steps alongthe evolutionary path that ultimately ledto all modern animals , including humans .
While many other sites with exceptional fossil preservation exist (such as China’s Chengjiang deposits), none offer anything quite like what we see at Burgess Shale . One key differenceis age : most other Lagerstättenare significantly younger than Burgess Shale , meaning that they preserve organisms from periods when animals had already evolved complex features such as hard skeletons (think dinosaurs or trilobites). As a result, these other sites do not give us nearly as much information about what earlier conditions were like or how particular innovations first arose duringevolutionary history . For example , while we might be able to infer something about feeding habits by looking at toothmarks left behind on bones , understandinghow an ancestral creature actually caughtand processed food requires direct evidence from exceptionally well-preservedfossils . And this is exactly what we get with manyof the specimensfrom MountStephen !