OPINION
Misadventures in the Burgess Shale
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.
his August marks the centenary of
T Charles Doolittle Walcott’s discovery of
the Burgess Shale — the fossil bed in the
Canadian Rockies that first opened mankind’s
eyes to the wealth of animals living in Cam-
brian seas 505 million years ago. The fossil bed
itself is famous; for decades ‘Burgess Shale life’
was synonymous with ‘Cambrian life’. Less well
known is the full story leading to Walcott’s dis-
covery in 1909.
The finding of Burgess Shale fossils in Yoho
National Park, British Columbia, was inevita-
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES
ble once the Canadian Pacific Railway ran its
track through Kicking Horse Valley, between
Mount Stephen and Mount Field in the 1880s.
The first fossils were found on Mount Stephen
by a carpenter helping to build a railway hotel,
attracting the attention of Richard McConnell
from the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC).
In September 1886, 23 years before Walcott’s
more famous find, McConnell hit on the
Mount Stephen trilobite beds: the first Burgess
Shale fossil site.
McConnell collected a host of trilobites, a
now extinct marine arthropod that is the trade-
mark creature of the Cambrian. He also found
two unusual specimens. Joseph Whiteaves, the
GSC chief palaeontologist, described these
in 1892 as the headless body of some sort of
shrimp, noting that the appendages of the
segmented body were not jointed, making it
a sort of non-arthropod arthropod. He called
it Anomalocaris, after this anomaly. Whiteaves
unwittingly set the pattern for much misiden-
tification and misclassification in Burgess Shale
fossil research. The true nature of these fossils
would not be revealed for 90 years.
The Darwin connection
Walcott first visited Mount Stephen in 1907 —
the year that he was appointed secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC —
to study the Cambrian stratigraphy of the area.
Two years later the Darwin centennial seems
to have provided the serendipitous stimulus for
his discovery of the Burgess Shale. Walcott was
given an honorary doctorate at the University
of Cambridge, UK, in June, as part of the 1909
celebrations. Afterwards he visited the British
Museum (Natural History) in London. The
keeper of geology there, Henry Woodward,
had observed in a 1902 paper that Mount Field
is part of the same massif as Mount Stephen
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NATURE|Vol 460|20 August 2009
and “will no doubt yield the same Cambrian
fossils”. Presumably Woodward repeated this
observation during Walcott’s visit, because,
on Walcott’s return to the Rockies nine weeks
later, he made straight for Mount Field.
On Saturday 28 August 1909, Walcott went
up to Burgess Pass, next to Mount Field, to
take photographs, and, according to his diary,
“found the Stephen formation trilobite bed”.
His family followed him up to the site on
30 August. The story often told is that Mrs
Charles Dolittle Walcott discovered the most
important, if not the first, Burgess Shale fossil beds.
Walcott’s horse stumbled on the important
‘discovery slab’. Instead, it seems that the man
leading the packhorse train crossed over a
rock that had slid onto the trail, and Walcott,
concerned that his wife’s horse might trip,
moved it away. The next day, he and Mrs Wal-
cott broke up the offending slab and found “a
remarkable group of Phyllopod crustaceans”.
Walcott sketched three in his diary.
Walcott did not immediately realize the
significance of what he had discovered. He
spent just five days collecting at the site. But
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
he returned to find the source of the discovery
slab in 1910, excavating the source rock layer
and making a large collection of fossils.
In 1911, Walcott began to describe his finds.
This was an unprecedented challenge. How to
classify fossilized animals for which there is
no known comparative material? This did not
seem to bother Walcott. As a long-time trilo-
bite expert, he began with the arthropods. One
of these he named Sidneyia inexpectans, after
his son Sidney, who had found the first speci-
men. Walcott portrayed it in a 1911 National
Geographic article along with giant claws that
had also been found at the site, with the cap-
tion: The King of the Cambrian World. Walcott
never found such claws attached to Sidneyia;
it seems that he simply associated the large,
obviously arthropodan claws with the largest
arthropod present. Like Whiteaves before him,
Walcott got it wrong.
Stab in the dark
Walcott’s next two papers, also published in
1911, were on four sea cucumbers, one jellyfish
and some annelid worms. These descriptions
revealed the exquisite preservation of Burgess
Shale fossils. These were all soft-bodied ani-
mals, with no hard parts. Preservation of such
creatures is extremely rare in the fossil record,
and was unknown for the Cambrian.
Walcott’s identifications did not fare well.
Only one of the sea cucumbers is still thought
to be a sea cucumber, and the jellyfish is
now known to be part of an extraordinary
arthropod. Of the 12 annelid worms, only
one is still recognized as such. Walcott was on
more familiar ground with his publication of
arthropods in 1912 but, even here, many of
the 18 genera he described are now known to
belong to classes different to those to which he
assigned them.
By the end of Walcott’s final excavation in
1917, he had collected some 65,000 fossils, and
observed: “This practically exhausts a quarry
which has given the finest and largest series of
Middle Cambrian fossils yet discovered in any
formation in any country.” Despite his obvi-
ous pride in making such a fabulous collection,
Walcott’s main goal continued to be to study
the Lower Palaeozoic stratigraphy of the Cana-
dian Rockies. Of his 18 seasons in the area, he
spent 15 studying this, and only 3 (spread over
5 years) on the Burgess Shale fossils.
 NATURE|Vol 460|20 August 2009 OPINION

J. B. CARON/PARKS CANADA ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM

D. COLLINS J. PALEONTOL. 70, 280–293 (1996)

Anomalocaris, once described as a shrimp, was revealed by Desmond Collins’s Burgess Shale fossil find in 1991 (above) as a ‘terrible crab’ (reconstruction inset).

After Walcott’s death in 1927, his Burgess Opabinia and six others, mostly described much as dinosaurs preyed on Mesozoic land
Shale fossils languished on the upper shelves by another of Whittington’s students, Simon animals. They change, radically, our view of the
of the Smithsonian collections. His third Conway Morris, unclassifiable in any known Cambrian way of life.
wife, Mary Vaux, was unwilling to have oth- animal group. Stephen Jay Gould, in his 1989 With a flood of new specimens coming
ers rifling through them. This hiatus ended in book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the from 12 seasons of excavation between 1983
the late 1960s when Harry Whittington of the Nature of History, took the next logical step: he and 2000, new forms are being described and
University of Cambridge and his colleagues suggested that the eight unclassifiable “weird old forms redescribed. Today, we have returned
began a restudy of Burgess Shale animals, wonders” belonged to animal groups that had mostly to Walcott’s practice of classifying
based mainly on Walcott’s collections. become extinct. Burgess Shale animals in living animal groups,
Whittington changed the world’s perception Gould criticized Walcott for “shoehorning” but the groups are different. There are some
of Cambrian life when he redescribed Opab- his animals into known groups, so delay- extinct classes, such as the Dinocarida, but
inia, a bizarre looking animal ing the true understanding very few extinct phyla. Five of Gould’s weird
with a frontal nozzle and five “Virtually all animal of the Burgess Shale animals. wonders have been classified, only one in a
eyes. Walcott had classified it He attributed this to Walcott’s new phylum. This year, one of the conundrums
as an arthropod, but Whitting-
groups alive today conservatism and Presbyte- from Walcott’s time was solved — the claws
ton could find no appendages, were present in rian upbringing. To me, this of The King of the Cambrian World are now
jointed or not, so labelled it of Cambrian seas.” is nonsense. None of Walcott’s known to belong to Hurdia, a ‘terrible crab’.
“unknown affinities”. This was contemporaries, nor indeed Additional Cambrian material is now
the first time that anyone had questioned the scientists who followed him, questioned coming from the Chengjiang fauna in China
Walcott’s implicit assumption that Cambrian Walcott’s assumption that the Burgess Shale (particularly new chordates, the group that
animals belonged to groups alive today. animals belonged to living animal groups; not includes humans), and the Sirius Passet fauna
until Whittington. True, many of Walcott’s in Greenland. Along with the Burgess Shale
Weird wonders zoological assignments were wrong, but this animals, they demonstrate that virtually all
As for the Anomalocaris ‘shrimp’ first described led others to attempt to correct his mistakes. animal groups alive today were present in
by Whiteaves, Whittington’s student Derek In effect, Walcott’s misadventures provided the Cambrian seas.
Briggs recognized in 1979 that it was more incentive for later revelations. Walcott’s 1909 discovery was not the first,
likely to be an appendage of some larger crea- Since 1975, I have led 18 seasons of field- but the best Burgess Shale site. By his collec-
ture. Soon after this, Whittington began to work and excavation in the Burgess Shale by tions and publications, Walcott contributed
excavate from the enclosing rock what seemed Royal Ontario Museum parties. We greatly more than anyone, before or since, to draw-
to be part of one of these appendages in an expanded the existing quarries, and discovered ing back the curtain obscuring our view of the
unknown fossil. To his amazement, his prepa- and excavated three new faunas, each with its life of the Cambrian world. For this alone, he
ration revealed two Anomalocaris appendages own distinct composition. In 1991, we found deserves the glory of this month’s centennial
as frontal claws. Moreover, what Walcott the first complete Anomalocaris. For the first celebrations. ■
had called a jellyfish in 1911 was revealed to time, we could see what it actually looked like: Desmond Collins served as curator of
be radiating jaws in a circular mouth at the a metre-long, fierce predator with large claws invertebrate palaeontology and head of
front. This animal was like nothing ever seen and radiating jaws. Two forms were described palaeobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum from
before — “unlike other shrimps”, as Whiteaves and assigned to a new class of arthropods, the 1968 to 2004. He is now retired.
had written, was an understatement. Dinocarida — the ‘terrible crabs’. The dino- e-mail: Suzanne.collins029@sympatico.ca
Whittington’s work left Anomalocaris, carids preyed on animals in Cambrian seas Further reading online at http://tinyurl.com/oxgo9k.

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