The Burgess Shale
A mudslide in the Canadian Rockies buries a whole community, and palaeontology is never the same.
- When
- Known to
- ± 2 million years
- Era
- Cambrian, Paleozoic
Discovered in 1909 and roughly 508 million years old, the Burgess Shale preserves soft-bodied animals in exquisite detail — Opabinia with five eyes and a grasping proboscis, Hallucigenia walking on spines, Wiwaxia in scales, and Pikaia, a small chordate. Its reinterpretation in the 1970s and 1980s showed the Cambrian contained body plans with no modern counterpart, and reframed the history of animal life as a story of experimentation and loss.