Burgess Shale Sojourn: The Burgess Shale

I made it to Field, BC. I managed to book a spot with the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation (lady law requires a park naturalist to accompany each and every hiker that makes a journey to the fossil beds...so you have to book a spot - this is good. How many pieces of the puzzle would be lost to science if every person who decided to take a 20km round trip hike to the beds took a little piece home with them?). I managed to lock my keys in my car early on the morning of the hike....and once that was resolved I managed to make it to the trailhead where I met with my group (imagine my luck - a group of 13 geologists! Professional people talking geology and explaining their surroundings - as common conversation - as we trudged up the mountain. Ahhh...bliss).

And off we went, up the mountain....


Trail during the forested section.


The major warning sign along the way...


Rocky section mid way up. In the distance you can see Moraine Glacier and some pretty picturesque lateral moraines.

From forest to alpine back to forest...this time we are in an alpine forest...where the snow is yet to melt.

And back out into the rocky alpine...where the snow is still falling! Well, it fell the day before we went up.

ABOVE and BELOW: Fossilized trilobite 'pygidium' (rear end) that I dug out with me own hands.

Here is a velvet worm which displays the fascinating aspect of the Burgess Shale - soft body preservation. It is within things like this, ones even more perfectly preserved, that you can see the last meal of the critter before it died...a fossil has its gut contents fossilized and they are identifiable!

ABOVE and BELOW: These are trilobite specimens that paleontologists had found earlier in the shale and set aside for us to look at. Nearly perfect preservation.

Me standing beside the main outcropping of the Burgess Shale. Within these aged rocks are preserved ~500 million year old creatures that describe an exponential increase in biological diversity. Inspiring, to say the least. They look like rocks, they feel like rocks, they smell like rocks, they seem normal. But, within these rocks are the pieces of the puzzle that tell the precise evolutionary history of our world...of us. If a pilgrimage is necessary, it should be to places like this. Forget the superstitious regalia, forget religious dogma, forget pseudo-reality. This is our world, this is our time to understand this as best we can.