1. Invertebrate Zoology – ZOOL 3104

2. Burgess Shale

3. How are fossils made? Animal is buried (dead or alive)
Mud, silt, volcanic ash, or sand
Fossils could also be frozen in ice, mummified in hot or cold deserts, or preserved in tar
Usually, all of a living thing’s soft parts decay, leaving only the hard parts

4. How are fossils made II
Replacement: the minerals replace, molecule by molecule, the hard parts or the remains
Permineralization: minerals fill in the spaces of the hard parts of the remains

5. Burgess Shale
Made famous to the general public by Stephen Jay Gould Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

6. Burgess Shale
Shale is a sedimentary rock formed by the deposition of successive layers of clay.

7. Burgess Shale
Shale is a sedimentary rock formed by the deposition of successive layers of clay.
Located in Yoho National Park in the Rocky Mountains, near Field, British Columbia, Canada.

8. Burgess Shale Cambrian rock formation over 500 million years.
Shale is a sedimentary rock formed by the deposition of successive layers of clay.
Located in Yoho National Park in the Rocky Mountains, near Field, British Columbia, Canada.
Cambrian rock formation over 500 million years.

9. Burgess Shale So, what is so special about it?
Shale is a sedimentary rock formed by the deposition of successive layers of clay.
Located in Yoho National Park in the Rocky Mountains, near Field, British Columbia, Canada.
Cambrian rock formation over 500 million years.
So, what is so special about it?

10. A unique place
Exceptional preservation of soft bodied marine invertebrates.
Over 65,000 fossil specimens of 120 species from the Burgess Shale are housed at the Smithsonian.

11. Burgess Shale

12. How preservation works?
Good preservation indicates deposition in anoxic conditions

13. How preservation works?
Good preservation indicates deposition in anoxic conditions
Many delicate details of soft part anatomy are preserved. (Legs and gills of trilobites, etc.)

14. How preservation works?
Good preservation indicates deposition in anoxic conditions
Many delicate details of soft part anatomy are preserved. (Legs and gills of trilobites, etc.)
Swept off an adjacent, well-oxygenated carbonate platform by turbidity currents, and killed and protected from decay in anoxic water

15. http://burgess-shale. rom. on. ca/en/sea-odyssey/catastrophic-burial

17. The initial discovery Charles D. Walcott (1909)
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
( )

18. Charles D. Walcott

19. The Animals Mud dwellers, filter feeders
Strollers, walkers and crawlers
Swimmers and floaters

20. Filter Feeders
P: Porifera

21. Filter Feeders
P: Echinodermata: C: Crinoidea

22. Mud Dwellers:
C: Polychaeta (P: Annelida)

23. Strollers, walkers and crawlers
P: Onychophora

24. Strollers, walkers and crawlers
P: Onychophora

25. Strollers, walkers and crawlers
P: Onychophora

26. Hallucigenia sparsa an Onychophoran from the Burgess Shale deposits of Canada

27. Strollers, walkers and crawlers
Unknown phylum Wiwaxia

28. Strollers, walkers and crawlers
P: Arthropods

29. Swimmers and floaters
P: Arthropoda: SP: Trilobites

30. Swimmers and floaters
P: Ctenophora, and Cnidaria

31. Weird Creature Award
P: Arthropoda

32. Weird Creature Award

33. Weird Creature Award
Anomalocaris over 12 inches long!

34. The world’s first known chordate
Pikaia

35. The Big Picture Fossilization usually takes place only of hard parts
The Burgess Shale is unique in that it fossilized soft tissues
Many creatures fossilized in the shale are extinct and were truly unique.