B.ED. SCIENCE WITH SPECIALIZATION IN BIOLOGY Summary The Burgess Shale Fauna 3 Introduction 3 History of Discovery 3 Preservation Bias 4 Major Fossils 4 Concluding Remarks: 7 References: 8 The Burgess Shale Fauna Introduction The Burgess Shale Fauna is a fauna that it was built on the basis of a group of fossils initially found in the Burgess Shale Area in the Canadian Rockies (Gould, 1989). This is a very important group of fossils as “modern multicellular animals make their first unprotected appearance in the fossil record approximately 570 million years ago” through this group (Gould, 1989, pp. 24). Furthermore, the Burgess shales are known to have preserved the soft parts of animals allowing us to better understand life at the time. History of Discovery “For decades, 'Burgess-Shale life' has been synonymous with 'Cambrian life'” (Collins, 2009). This is because Cambrian life was only known from this place. According to Collins (2009) the first descriptions of the Burgess Fauna were made by Joseph Whiteaves, a chief paleontologist who made the initial descriptions of the Burgess Shale trilobites and unusual specimens which he called Anomalocaris (Collins, 2009). In 1907, Charles Dolittle Walcott, known for discovering the fauna of the Burgess Shale, visited the Canadian Rockies for the first time. His interest in fossils arose from an article written by Henry Woodward in which the author stated that Cambrian fossils were probably found at Mount Field (in the Canadian Rockies) (Collins 2009). This led Walcott and his family to travel to the location. An accident with his wife's horse led Walcott to make his first discovery of a common Burgess Shale fossil known as Marella. At the time he didn't notice the......middle of paper.......(2011). A new arthropod Jugatacaris agilis n. gen. N. sp. from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang Biota, southern China. Journal of Paleontology, 85(3), 567-586. doi:10.1666/09-173.1Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York, United States: WW Norton& Company Inc. Han, J., Zhang, Z. F., & Liu, J. N. (2008). A preliminary note on the dispersal of Cambrian Burgess Shale-type faunas. Gondwana Research, (1), 269-276. doi:10.1016/j.gr.2007.09.001Morris, S. C. (2009). Walcott, the Burgess Shale and the voices of a post-Darwinian world. Department of Earth Sciences University of Cambridge, 19(20). Retrieved from DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.046Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (2014). Fossil specimens of Burgess shale. Retrieved May 2014 from http://paleobiology.si.edu/burgess/burgessSpecimens.html