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The Burgess Shale is a fossil-bearing deposit exposed in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, Canada. [2] [3] ... "The Cambrian Explosion". In Our Time. BBC ...
The Burgess Shale is a series of sediment deposits spread over a vertical distance of hundreds of metres, extending laterally for at least 50 kilometres (30 mi). [18] The deposits were originally laid down on the floor of a shallow sea; during the Late Cretaceous Laramide orogeny, mountain-building processes squeezed the sediments upwards to their current position at around 2,500 metres (8,000 ...
The intense modern interest in this "Cambrian explosion" was sparked by the work of Harry B. Whittington and colleagues, who, in the 1970s, reanalysed many fossils from the Burgess Shale and concluded that several were as complex as, but different from, any living animals.
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is a 1989 book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.The volume made The New York Times Best Seller list, [1] was the 1991 winner of the Royal Society's Rhone-Poulenc Prize, the American Historical Association's Forkosch Award, and was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
A Burgess Shale trilobite showing soft-part preservation. Burgess Shale-type deposits occur either on the continental slope or in a sedimentary basin.They are known in sediments deposited at all water depths during the Precambrian (Riphean stage onwards), with a notable gap in the last 150 million years of the Proterozoic. [6]
Gaines also works on Burgess Shale-type fossil assemblages in the Wheeler formation in House Range, UT. [18] With his work around the world on the Burgess Shale he is helping to resolve one of the great mysteries relating to the Cambrian Explosion; the mechanism for the precise preservation of these fossils.
Simon Conway Morris FRS (born 1951) is an English palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist known for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. The results of these discoveries were celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life.
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).His and subsequent finds, all from the Mount Stephen area, came to the attention of palaeontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott, who in 1907 found time to reconnoitre the area.