The Burgess Shale is an area found in the Canadian Rocky Mountains known as the Burgess Pass. It is located in British Columbia's Yoho National Park. The area is one of the most well-preserved fossil localities in the world. It contains the best existing record of Cambrian animal fossils.
The Burgess Shale was discovered in 1909 by Charles D. Walcott of the Smithsonian Institution. Decades of work on the site has revealed that the Burgess Shale included multiple fossil bearing layers of about 2 meters thick stacked 150 meters high and over 60,000 unique fossils have been found. Anthropods are by far the dominant fossils found, but other fossils found include worms, crinoids, sea cucumbers, chordates, and other organisms with no mineralized shell. Most fossils were found in underwater banks known as the phyllopod beds. The Burgess fauna contains many fossils of soft bodied animals as well as those with hard parts. This is a tremendous opportunity for researchers because the soft bodied fossils are rarely found anywhere else -- such organisms are usually destroyed before they can be preserved as fossils.
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