![]() ![]() The Burgess fossils tell nothing less than the story of the Cambrian explosion-evolution's Big Bang-when relatively simple organisms rapidly diversified into the sorts of animals that live today. ![]() At the end of his first field season here, Walcott wrote in a letter to a colleague that he had "found some very interesting things." Talk about understatement. ![]() Charles Doolittle Walcott, the fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered this rich fossil bed a century ago, in the summer of 1909, and named it for nearby Mount Burgess. The Burgess Shale is Mecca for paleontologists. She bit into an Oreo cookie and fanned her face in nervous excitement. "Yay! Fossils! We're really here!" exclaimed Allison Daley, a graduate student from Sweden's Uppsala University. Eventually the team reunited at the top of the cliff and collapsed, surveying the view over the Burgess Shale. As the others caught their breath, he zipped his way across loose and jagged rock up the final ascent. After four hours of hiking up switchbacks through an evergreen forest deep in the Canadian Rockies, Caron suddenly took off like a mountain goat. ![]() The soundtrack came courtesy of an anti-bear bell attached to the backpack of the group's leader, Jean-Bernard Caron, a curator of invertebrate paleontology at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. The fossil-hunting expedition began with a lung-busting hike, accompanied by an incessant ring-ding-ting-clank-clank-ring-ting-ding-clank. ![]()
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