Preview

The Burgess Shale, a Type of Soft-Shelled Fossil

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1291 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Burgess Shale, a Type of Soft-Shelled Fossil
The Burgess Shale

Jared Yeargan
EES 112
02-32318-2123

May 9th
Spring 2012

As scientists seeking clues to the Earth’s and Mankind’s past; expeditions spanning the globe are often launched in search of fossils. Soft-shelled fossils are extremely rare due to their inherent fragility and rarity of necessary conditions to preserve such specimens. The Burgess Shale formation located in British Columbia contains some of the best-preserved and most abundant collections of soft-shelled fossils known. Referred to as a Lagerstatten; or “place of excellent preservation”, the Burgess houses many relatives of familiar species we see living today, as well as some hitherto unique and unknown to paleontologists. Indeed the most significant aspects of this site may shed light on todays most controversial, and modern science’s most puzzling arguments. This paper will briefly introduce the formations geography history, as well as explore specific fossilized specimens found in the Shale to emphasize the sites importance as a World Heritage Site and it’s relevance to science today.
Within the Yoho National Park, the fossil quarries arise in the Burgess Pass, the southwest-facing saddle between Mount Wapta and Mount Field. This saddle contains two quarries: The Walcott is the lower quarry; with Raymond quarry just above. First visited by Charles Bishop Walcott in 1907, the main shale site known and studied today was deposited at the base of a 160m cliff wasn’t officially discovered until 1909. Fossils found within are estimated to about 505 million years old, dating to the mid to late Cambrian period. During this period, the site rested on the west coast of North America very near the equatorial position as a coastal shallow reef; as graphically depicted in the following model.

(http://www.burgess-shale.bc.ca…). Because of the varying angles in which specimens were discovered as well as sediment found within these specimens joints, Harry B. Whittington deduced



References: Books: Briggs, D.E.G; Erwin. D.H.; Collier, F.J. 1995. Fossils of the Burgess Shale. Washington: Smithsonian Inst. Press Gould, Stephen Jay. 1989. Wonderful Life. W.W. Norton and Company. 347 p. Harry B. Whittington. 1985. The Burgess Shale. Yale University. 147 p. Levin, Harold L. 1999. Ancient Invertebrates and Their Living Relatives. Prentice Hall. 358 p. Moore, Raymond C.; Lalicker, Cecil G; Fischer, Alfred G. Invertebrate Fossils. McGraw-Hill Book Co. Pg. 487 Morris, Simon Conway. 1998. The Crucible of Creation. Oxford University Press. 242 p. Paul D. Taylor and David N. Lewis. 2005. Fossil Invertebrates. Harvard University Press. 208 p. Amount of marrella specimens [http://www.burgess-shale.bc.ca/discover/ancient-creatures/marrella]

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    eig121

    • 3791 Words
    • 16 Pages

    The author and his colleagues specifically chose to focus on 375 million year old rocks in their search for fossils because this was the time frame that provided fish that would be useful to study from. The 385 million year old rocks provided fish that look too similar to the ones we have now and the 365 million year old rocks have fossils that don’t resemble fish. The 375 million year old rocks, however, provide fossils that show the transition between fish and land living animals. Sedimentary rocks are the type of rock that preserves the fossils. Limestone, siltstone, shale, and sandstone are examples of this. The reason why these rocks are the best at preservation is because they are formed by a process that includes the movement of lakes, rivers, and seas. A rock in a body of water has the potential to fossilize because after the gradual compression on the layers in the body of water forming, chemical processes are still happening.…

    • 3791 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    References: Mortenson T., (2003.). The Origin of Old-Earth Geology and its Ramifications for Life in the 21st Century, 1/9-6/9.…

    • 920 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Badlands National Park

    • 721 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Pierre Shale is black in color and deposited by sediment filtered through seawater and black mud on the sea floor that hardened into Shale. This formation took place 69-75 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. Some of the…

    • 721 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Harden, Deborah Reid. California Geology. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004. Print.…

    • 1766 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Weston Meehan

    • 3393 Words
    • 14 Pages

    Owen, Sir Richard. "Report on British Fossil Reptiles. Part II." Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 60-204 (1842): 42. Print. (Journal)…

    • 3393 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Attention to detail and completeness: The Redwall Limestone layer is formed by red stained cliffs that range in height from 550 feet to 900 feet. It is a deeply eroded dis conformity by deeply incised paleovalleys and deep paleokrast. The Temple Butte Limestone is formed by discontinuous lenses, and relatively inconspicuous lenses that fill paleovalleys cut into the underlying Muav Limestone. Consists of a westward thickening layer of inter bedded dolomite, sandy dolomite, sandstone, mud stone, and…

    • 575 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Carol, R. L. “The Origin of Reptiles.” In Origins of the Higher Groups of Tetrapods” Controversy and Consensus, edited by H. P. Schultze and L. Trueb. Ithaca, NY: Comstock, 1991.…

    • 2285 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Earth Science

    • 652 Words
    • 3 Pages

    1.) What is the age of the oldest sediments recovered using deep-ocean drilling? How do the ages of these sediments compare to the ages of the oldest continental rocks?…

    • 652 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Mill Hall Research Paper

    • 6931 Words
    • 28 Pages

    This site is located approximately 6 km N from the axis of the Nittany Valley Anticline, and 7 km NW of Site 6. The formation is a heavily jointed and steeply tilted sandstone from the Juniata Formation. Close up observations and measurements were not able to be taken due to the road-cut being in a precarious location. Measurements were taken on a preliminary trip to the location and were used for…

    • 6931 Words
    • 28 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Best Essays

    Dodson, P., Behrensmeyer, A.K., Bakker, R., and McIntosh, J. 1980. Taphonomy and Paleoecology of the Dinosaur Beds of the Jurassic Morrison Formation. Paleobiology 6: 208-232.…

    • 3629 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Better Essays

    The Triassic-Jurassic

    • 1193 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Palfy, Jozef and Attila Demeny. 2001. Carbon isotope anomaly and other geochemical changes at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary from a marine section in Hungry. Geology 29 number 11, 1047-1050.…

    • 1193 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Burgess Shale

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages

    A simple rock formation located in British Colombia, Canada, may not seem like much to the untrained eye, but to Charles Doolittle Walcott and other paleontologists, it is a treasure trove of thousands of uniquely preserved fossils. Millions of years ago, North America rested on the equator. Earth was still too young for terrestrial plants and animals to inhabit the hostile land; instead, they dwelled in the sea where a vast array of organisms thrived. The fossil records beautifully preserved in the shale rock, tell the story of the Cambrian Explosion, a period where organisms evolved at an explosive rate into many diverse creatures that are the ancestors to many of the organisms today, including humans. Over the past century, the Burgess Shale has unearthed new books to earth’s history and still holds new secrets for scientist to find. The discovery of the rock formation shook the foundations of the science community at the time, and revolutionized their understanding of evolution. The Burgess Shale is the best fossil site in the world due to the various collections of detailed fossils, and the influence of the fossil field on evolutionary knowledge.…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Williston Basin Report

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The first unit above the granitic basement rocks of the Williston basin is the Deadwood Formation. The Deadwood was deposited during the Upper Cambrian Sauk major sequence, which was a major first order transgression. The transgression moved west to east making the Deadwood thicker in the west. It deposited siliciclastic glauconite rich marine sandstones, and shales with very thin carbonate beds throughout.…

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Burgess Shale Legend

    • 390 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The Burgess Shale is found in Yoho Park, British columbia. Back when they were formed, the area where they were found was called Laurentia, between the two mountains Mt. Wapta and Mt. Field. The Burgess Shale are fossils that remained on the ground, and were heavily preserved during the Cambrian period (540 million years ago). The specific conditions allowed softer organs…

    • 390 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    3rd geo report RE WRITE 3

    • 1354 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Located within the Hudson Highlands proto-continents collided giving rise to a major crustal thickening event called the Grenville Orogeny. It is important to study it because, it provides the geologic history of that particular area. In order to study the area, one must be able to identify detailed information about identifying rock types, mineral composition and associating it with its proper metamorphic facies.…

    • 1354 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays