I received some awesome news recently: I'll be working as a tour guide/lecturer at the Burgess Shale this summer. For those of you without much knowledge about paleontology, this is a supremely fascinating and important fossil complex in the mountains near Field, B.C. It's what's known as a Konservat-Lagerstätte: a literal translation from the original German would be 'conservation storage area,' where specimens are not only preserved incredibly well, but whole.
The wonderful preservation of specimens gives us a literal snap-shot of life at the time - in this case, around the middle Cambrian era, about 500 million years ago (hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs). Often the most initially striking thing about the Burgess Shale is the often alien form and function of the animals therein. Scientists who initially approached the study of these animals assumed them to be a bit odd, somewhat primitive but perfectly classifiable with respect to life as we know it today. It took some frustration and bewilderment, but the observations insisted - this assumption needed discarding. While there were a few specimens that would eventually give way to modern genera (Sanctacaris would arguably beget modern chelicerates; Canadaspis would foreshadow the crustaceans), the large majority of animals in the Burgess Shale were completely unique and genetically isolated from life thereafter.
This is literally an alien world were talking about here, but we don't need a space ship to visit it; just a time machine, which is provided by the amazing and highly unlikely extent of the fossil preservation up in the mountains of B.C. Just as you see stars that are hundreds of thousands of years old when you observe the night sky (the time its taken for the light of its image to reach us), to visit and study fossil beds like the Burgess Shale is to see life as it was in the adolescence of the Earth, the midsection of geological time's Eiffel Tower, on which we as humans are only the uppermost coat of paint. To not be awed by this, I think, is inhuman. To not acknowledge this is to cheapen life as we know it.
The wonderful preservation of specimens gives us a literal snap-shot of life at the time - in this case, around the middle Cambrian era, about 500 million years ago (hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs). Often the most initially striking thing about the Burgess Shale is the often alien form and function of the animals therein. Scientists who initially approached the study of these animals assumed them to be a bit odd, somewhat primitive but perfectly classifiable with respect to life as we know it today. It took some frustration and bewilderment, but the observations insisted - this assumption needed discarding. While there were a few specimens that would eventually give way to modern genera (Sanctacaris would arguably beget modern chelicerates; Canadaspis would foreshadow the crustaceans), the large majority of animals in the Burgess Shale were completely unique and genetically isolated from life thereafter.
This is literally an alien world were talking about here, but we don't need a space ship to visit it; just a time machine, which is provided by the amazing and highly unlikely extent of the fossil preservation up in the mountains of B.C. Just as you see stars that are hundreds of thousands of years old when you observe the night sky (the time its taken for the light of its image to reach us), to visit and study fossil beds like the Burgess Shale is to see life as it was in the adolescence of the Earth, the midsection of geological time's Eiffel Tower, on which we as humans are only the uppermost coat of paint. To not be awed by this, I think, is inhuman. To not acknowledge this is to cheapen life as we know it.
