|
paleobiology art Strange Creatures - A Burgess Shale Fossil Sampler More than 1/2 BILLION years old, the fossils of the Burgess Shale fauna preserve for us an intriguing glimpse of early animal life on Earth. These fossils are named after a Cambrian rock formation (the Burgess Shale) that is located in the western Canadian Rockies. They were first discovered there in 1909 by Charles D. Walcott, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The vaults of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History currently house over 65,000 specimens, the largest collection of these fossils in the world.
 [more] thanks to dublog A wonderful book on the Burgess Shale is Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, by Stephen Jay Gould. |