Materials for this virtual exhibit – called “The Burgess Shale” – were produced and/or compiled by Parks Canada (for the Parks Canada section) and the Royal Ontario Museum (for all other sections) for the Canadian Heritage Information Network (Virtual Museum of Canada program) for the purposes of providing the public with information about the Burgess Shale. The term “materials” includes all or any information, artwork, text, video, audio, animations or image files.
This virtual exhibit comprises and contains copyrighted materials. Copyright in such materials remains with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Parks Canada or other copyright owners. The material on this site is covered by the provisions of the Copyright Act, by Canadian laws, policies, regulations and international agreements. Such provisions serve to identify the information source and, in specific instances, to prohibit reproduction of materials without written permission.
Information on this website has been posted with the intent that it be readily available for non-commercial, personal use only. Personal users may copy or share the material produced by Parks Canada and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) under the following conditions: the material must not be modified, must retain any associated copyright or other proprietary notices, and must acknowledge the source of the material. The source citations should include the URL where the material comes from.
All other uses are prohibited without the express written authorization of Parks Canada and the ROM, including:
Reproduction of any kind in any medium and redistribution in any manner for commercial* use, including commercial publication, or for personal gain.
*Definition of commercial use: material used in a product produced by a commercial entity or by a non-profit entity for profit-making, commercial purposes or a product produced and distributed free of charge, at cost, or at a minimal charge generally by a non-profit organization.
Anyone wishing to use the materials from this website for these or other purposes must obtain prior written approval from Parks Canada or the ROM or other copyright owners.
For information on and permission to use Parks Canada images, including licensing requests, and other Parks Canada media such as, photo, film or video, please contact:
Parks Canada – National Photo Collection
25 Eddy Street, 3rd Floor
Gatineau, Quebec
Canada
K1A 0M5
Fax: 819.994.2120
E-mail: information@pc.gc.ca
Please quote the reference number(s) of the image(s) in all correspondence.
For further information about Parks Canada copyrights, please visit: http://www.pc.gc.ca/avis-notice_e.asp#a1
For information on and permission to use ROM images, including licensing requests, and other ROM media such as film or video, please contact:
Tel.: 416.586.5590
Fax: 416.586.5642
E-mail: images@rom.on.ca
The ROM has taken all reasonable efforts to ensure that materials, for which copyright belongs to others, are reproduced on this website with the full consent of the copyright owners. The ROM does not warrant that the use of materials displayed in the website will not infringe the rights of third parties. Such works may not be used in any form; they may not be copied or downloaded without prior permission from the third party.
Many of the trade-marks displayed on this website including the “Royal Ontario Museum,” ROM and Parks Canada logos, are registered and/or unregistered marks of the Royal Ontario Museum and Parks Canada, respectively. The trade-marks of third parties may also be displayed on the website. Use cannot be made of such trade-marks without the express written permission of the ROM or when applicable, the third party. Any queries in this respect should also be addressed to the contact noted above.
In 1990, noted palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould spoke at the Royal Ontario Museum about the fossils of the Burgess Shale. While many of Gould’s interpretations have been challenged, his talk provides a snapshot of how the organisms were viewed then. (6:20)
So this is Marrella. I should say that arthropods are classified primarily by numbers of segments and patterns in their various body parts.
And here’s Marrella, it’s an arthropod that doesn’t fit into any group. It has these two sets of spines… there it is. It doesn’t have any allegiance.
So Whittington was puzzled when he first published on Marrella in 1971 but he went on and the next creature he studied was Yohoia.
Looked like a shrimp, had been called one by Walcott, and again, as Whittington studied it with care, it just didn’t fit into any modern group. It looks like a shrimp superficially, but when you start counting the segments you don’t have anything like the crustacean body plan.
For instance, up in the head you have this unique set of frontal appendages which have no homologue anywhere else in the arthropods. Whittington ended up calling them simply “the great appendages” because he didn’t know what to do with them.
This is Odaraia, a creature that swims on its back and has a tail fluke that looks more like a whale than an arthropod, but again, not allied to anything.
Looked vaguely like a swimming crustacean, but isn’t when you look at the segments and their patterns of the tail.
This is Sidneyia, which was described by Walcott as a chelicerate, that is a member of the horseshoe crab, eventually the spider-scorpion group. And in some superficial sense that’s what it looks like. But in detail it isn’t.
All chelicerates have six pairs of appendages on their head. Sidneyia has one pair. It’s not like anything… just these antennae… it’s not like anything else… it is just is what it is.
This is Habelia, an odd creature…
… with tubercules all over its body.
This is Leanchoilia, my personal favourite for elegance, but not among the survivors.
Again, these odd great appendages, as Whittington calls them, with their whiplash endings.
This is Aysheaia.
Now, this creature is probably an onychophore, that is it is a member of a modern group symbolized by the genus with the wonderful name Peripatus, which is a not very well known group, but it’s thought to be possibly intermediary between annelids and arthropods and may be the ancestor of the insect group. So here we may have a creature that is truly related to one of the surviving groups of arthropods.
And here is a form that Des Collins found and initially gave a field name, following paleontological tradition…
… he called it “Santa Claws”. And eventually named it Sanctacaris, which means much the same thing. Now again, does it look any different than the ones I just showed you?
Would you have picked out this creature for success? Could you have predicted that this, by virtue of superiority would go on? Yet it looks as though Sanctacaris really is a chelicerate.
There are six pairs of appendages in the right place on the head so this animal may be at least a cousin to one of the successful lineages. Again, would you have known? Could anyone have known?
This is Opabinia. Opabinia, I think, should stand as one of the great moments in the history of human knowledge.
Because Opabinia, which was described as an arthropod, a shrimp-like creature, by Walcott, who shoehorned it into modern groups as he always did. Opabinia was the first creature re-studied by Whittington that broke the conceptual dam, so to speak, and gave insights into this new world.
Because Whittington began his studies in the early 1970s on Opabinia thinking it would be an arthropod. He realizes, as Walcott did not, that there was some three-dimensionality in these creatures, that they were not just films on the rock.
That he could therefore dissect through and find structures underneath. So he said “Now I can resolve this, I’ll dissect through the body and find the appendages underneath which will prove its arthropod nature. He dissected through and he found nothing. There are no appendages.
And as he reconstructed Opabinia, he came to understand it is not an arthropod, it is some bizarre creature of its own unique anatomy. And in publishing a monograph on Opabinia in 1975 I think you have the breakthrough point in the new interpretation of the Burgess Shale.
Here is Marianne’s picture of Opabinia, a bizarre creature with five-count them, five-eyes, this vacuum-cleaner like nozzle with a food-collecting device in front, this bellows-like apparatus behind, followed by a tail. I don’t know what it is. It’s just weird.
This is Nectocaris, a peculiar creature that looks like a chordate behind, combined with a fin ray…
… and more like an octopod in the front. Who knows?
This is Dinomischus, a peculiar, stalked, stemmed creature…
… with no known affinity to anything else.
This is Odontogriphus, literally meaning “the toothed mystery” a good name.
A flat, gelatinous, annulated creature with a row of tooth-like structures surrounding a mouth and a pair of sensory palps.
Walcott described three separate genera which he allocated, as was his wont, according to the shoehorn, into three conventional groups.
This animal he called a jellyfish and called Peytoia.
This creature he called a sea cucumber and called Laggania.
And this, which had been described before and looks like the body of an arthropod, he called (it had been named before) Anomalocaris, meaning “the odd shrimp”. Well I think that you’ve guessed it already.
It turns out that all three go together. They form a single creature which is one of the weirdest of all the odd animals of the Burgess.
It’s also the largest Cambrian organism. Some specimens are almost a metre in length.
The so-called jellyfish is the mouth of this creature, working on a circular, nutcracker principle rather than the jaw of vertebrates principle.
The Anomalocaris itself turns out to be one of a pair of feeding appendages, and the so-called sea cucumber is the body of the whole animal.
