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Misadventures in the Burgess Shale

Nature volume 460, pages 952–953 (2009)Cite this article

One hundred years after Charles Doolittle Walcott found a wealth of Cambrian fossils in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Desmond Collins reflects on the bumpy road of their classification.

The finding of Burgess Shale fossils in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, was inevitable once the Canadian Pacific Railway ran its track through Kicking Horse Valley, between Mount Stephen and Mount Field in the 1880s. The first fossils were found on Mount Stephen by a carpenter helping to build a railway hotel, attracting the attention of Richard McConnell from the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). In September 1886, 23 years before Walcott's more famous find, McConnell hit on the Mount Stephen trilobite beds: the first Burgess Shale fossil site.

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  1. Desmond Collins served as curator of invertebrate palaeontology and head of palaeobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum from 1968 to 2004. He is now retired. Suzanne.collins029@sympatico.ca ,

    Desmond Collins

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  1. Desmond Collins
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Collins, D. Misadventures in the Burgess Shale. Nature 460, 952–953 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460952a

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