"At the base of a ridge in the Canadian Rocky Mountains lie the types of fossils that make geologists giddy, the remnants of a flourishing undersea world from more than 500 million years ago. They are preserved today in a rock layer called the Burgess Shale near the town of Field, British Columbia. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the shale and its astonishingly well-preserved fossils, revealed by Smithsonian Institution paleontologist Charles Walcott in late August, 1909.
For those uninitiated into the world of ancient time and long-lost fossils, the shale appears to be nothing more than rocks layered and stacked into mountains. But the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould summed up the importance of this rock formation to science in his bestselling book "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History." The shale, he said, contains "the world's most important animal fossils."
Most animal fossils consist of hard parts like shells, teeth and bones that are less likely to decay and rot away than soft tissue. But the Burgess fossils, despite hundreds of millions of years of geological processes crushing, twisting, and heating them, are extraordinarily well-preserved, with soft tissue such as eyeballs and guts transformed into rock. In the century since this discovery, only a few other high quality soft fossil sites have been found around the globe."
Cambrian Origins #2
