Misadventures in the Burgess Shale

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Abstract
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 science of palaeontology owes much to the discovery, 100 years ago this month, of the Burgess Shale fossil deposits in the Yoho National Park, British Columbia, Canada. This remarkable record of the diverse life in the Cambrian oceans of 505 million years ago has become justly famous and is celebrated in Stephen J. Gould's book Wonderful Life. In Opinion this week Desmond Collins revisits the story of the discovery of the shales by Charles Doolittle Walcott. Given the knowledge available at the time, Walcott faced a daunting challenge in trying to decipher just what he had found. There were some false trails and for several decades the fossils were all but forgotten, but Walcott's achievement, says Collins, fully deserves the centennial celebrations now under way. For more on the shales, go to Nicola Jones's blog from the 'Walcott 2009' meeting in Banff on http://tinyurl.com/burgess100 and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

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