What is the Burgess Shale?
The Burgess shale is a collection of extremely well-preserved fossils from the Cambrian period, from about 550 to 480 million years ago. It is located near Burgess Pass, high up in the Canadian Rockies in the province of British Columbia. Although discovered in 1909, it was not until the 1980s that the fossils were rediscovered and their true significance determined. The black shale in which these organisms are preserved, from which the Burgess shale gets its name, has an extremely fine grain size, allowing for high-quality fossils and even the fossilization of organisms lacking hard shells. The Burgess shale is famous for what it has told us about the Cambrian explosion, a period of time in the early Cambrian when all major phyla of life emerged in a paleontologically negligible amount of time, only a couple tens of millions of years.
