Burgess Shale Cambrian Palaeontological Record

The Burgess Shale has proved critical to the scientific understanding of the Cambrian explosion, an event that marked the first appearance of recognizable animals in the fossil record. Characterized by exceptional preservation of soft-bodied organisms, the Burgess Shale yields an extraordinary diversity of marine animals that lived along or near the Cambrian seafloor, including sponges, ctenophores, cnidarians, echinoderms, hemichordates, chordates, chaetognaths, molluscs, annelids, priapulids and arthropods, in addition to cyanobacteria and algae. This site provides a wealth of information for a range of paleoecological and evolutionary studies, including research into some of our deepest relatives (eg. Morris and Caron 2013), and also provides the basis for large scale quantitative palaeocommunity studies due to the abundance of specimens preserved at multiple sites (eg. Nanglu et al., 2020).

Burgess Shale fossils are found at several locations within the regional Stephen Formation clastic sedimentary sequence in Yoho National Park and Kootenay National Park. The Stephen Formation is divided into “thin” and “thick” expressions representing platformal and basinal facies respectively (Aitken and Fritz, 1968). Burgess Shale fossils occur mainly in the thick Stephen Formation where it consists of a succession of thin-bedded mudstones, claystone, and carbonate up to 300m thick.