The Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada, is famous for its exceptional preservation of bizarre, soft-bodied invertebrate lifeforms, a window into the Middle Cambrian World of 510 million years ago.
Burgess Shale-like faunas are now known from localities world-wide, but recently paleontologists discovered in Morocco a Burgess fauna from rocks 30 million years younger than the Cambrian faunas.
Burgess shale faunas were thought to have gone extinct after the Middle Cambrian. This new discovery suggests that the disappearance of the older fauna was a due to the absence of suitable conditions for fossilization rather than extinction, and it underlines the importance of understanding the conditions and processes leading to fossilization, and it opens the possibility of finding other Burgess faunas.
From P. Van Roy, P. J. Orr, J. P. Botting, L. A. Muir, Jacob Vinther, B. Lefebvre, K. el Hariri, and D. E. G. Briggs. 2010. Ordovician faunas of Burgess Shale type. Nature 465:215-218. A longer summary of their research is here. Photo of Marella, a Burgess arthropod, from the original article.
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