History of the Burgess Shale
The Burgess Shale, a series of fossil beds in the Canadian Rockies, was first noticed in 1886 by Richard McConnell of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC).
These analyses heightened interest in the existing debate about whether the Cambrian explosion represented a truly abrupt evolution of recognisable animals or was the result of a longer development, most of which was hidden by gaps in the known sets of fossils that had been found.
In 1975 the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) began collecting, found 7,750 new specimens around the existing sites, and discovered similar fossil beds up to 40 kilometres (25 mi) away.
Their collection currently stands at 140,000 specimens and growing, and the rate at which new species are found suggests that the Burgess Shale will continue to produce important discoveries for the foreseeable future.
The richness of fossils in the Field area was first identified by workers associated with the construction of the Trans-Canada railway, which had (somewhat controversially) been routed through the Kicking Horse valley.
Whilst there, he had met the Natural History Museum curator Henry Woodward, who had suggested that the nearby Mount Field may yield further fossils of the ilk of the Trilobite beds.
[6] They began to excavate this outcrop, sending blocks by pack horse to Walcott's wife, who split the shale and prepared fossils for transportation downhill to Field, and onwards by rail to Washington.
[10] Unfortunately, administrative duties became a growing burden on Walcott's time, and the Burgess took a back seat to the completion of his attempts to document the stratigraphy of the southern Rockies, an extensive work which he did not live to see published.
As he showed a visiting trilobite expert around Raymond's collections, the necessity of a restudy was pointed out to Whittington, who proceeded to lobby the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) to revisit the locality.
[9] In the company of Jim Aitken and Bill Fritz, he led a GSC reconnaissance expedition in 1966; fellow trilobitologist David Bruton joined the crew the next year as they went out to quarry in force.
[9] With an overwhelmingly diverse fauna in need of cataloguing, Harry Whittington set his two new graduate students to the task, assigning Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris the arthropods and 'worms', respectively.
[8] This work began to lift the veil on an unexpectedly diverse ecosystem, with almost as much variety as seen in the modern oceans – the old theory that Cambrian life was simple, straightforward and slightly dull disintegrated further with each new fossil described.
Parks Canada would redirect other museums' requests for material to the ROM, so the 1975 collection team gathered ample specimens to meet the anticipated teaching and display requirements.
[5] To mark the hundredth anniversary of Walcott's discovery of the main Burgess Shale site on Fossil Ridge, an international conference of 150 specialists in the field was held in Banff, Alberta, in August 2009.
