The Burgess Shale is located in British Columbia and is a site of marine fossils that are 506 million years old. It is celebrated for its “weird wonders,” containing a treasure trove of astonishingly well-preserved fossils.
These organisms harken back to the Cambrian explosion, a time in Earth’s history when major animal groups were diverging from each other in a burst of evolutionary innovation. In addition to the first representatives of most surviving animal groups, Cambrian deposits preserve a menagerie of sea-dwelling invertebrates unlike anything alive today.
