Originally the name given to an outcrop of rocks in the Yoko National Park in the Canadian Rockies discovered in 1909, and estimated at 530 years old. What makes the Burgess Shale so famous for paleontological studies is the remarkable animal fossils preserved in the rocks—known as the Sirius Passet fauna—fauna that belongs to some of the earliest history of animal life on Earth (animal life is believed to have first appeared about 600 million years ago). The Burgess Shale fossils are remarkable particularly both in number and diversity (some 70,000 species), for their novelty and beauty, as well as the fact that most of them (95%) are most of them are of the soft-bodied or had only thin skeletons variety that usually do not get fossilized well. The fossils also indicate the all the basic body plans well already present very early in the history of animal life on Earth (what became known as the Cambrian Explosion) a major obstacle in the darwininan principle of gradualism.
The Burgess Shale was first discovered by accident by Charles Walcott (then director of the Smithsonian Institute) in1909, similar deposits of fossils have also been discovered in the Maotianshan Shale in Chengjiang in west Yunnan, China in 1995.
Further Reading & Resources:
Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Greation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: OUP, 1998).
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