While most of the conference’s 150 participants are paleontologists, geologists or biologists, a handful are interested hobbyists, at least one of whom has an entire basement museum of fossils he has collected over the years. Keynyn Brysse’s talk was fantastic for the more general audience – including myself.

Brysse is not a paleontologist, but a historian of science (she did her BSc in paleontology, and was headed in that direction, but found she couldn’t abide the field work thanks to extreme and persistent sun stroke). She spelled out clearly the different ways in which scientists have been inclined to label the Burgess Shale creatures over the years. From about 1890 to the 1960s is what could be called ‘Phase I’, or, as Stephen J. Gould termed it in his seminal book Wonderful Life, the ‘Shoehorn Phase’. During this time, the creatures seen in the shale were lumped into whatever phylum they were most similar to. Though that may sound sensible, it put many creatures into categories where they clearly did not perfectly fit. In ‘Phase II’, from about 1970 to 1985, such oddball creatures were instead granted their entirely own phyla. Gould called this the ‘Weird Wonders’ phase, and it resulted in a proliferation of more than 20 new categories of life – something, perhaps, of an over-enthusiastic response. Today, Brysse points out, we are in Phase III, or what Gould disparagingly called the ‘Straightening Rod’ phase (as it doesn’t fit with his ideas). In this period, life forms do not necessarily have to fit neatly within a given phylum – they can instead be a ‘stem’ group, branching off from some more familiar ‘crown’ group. This falls into the now-popular form of biological classification called cladistics.

Continue reading →

Yesterday it was 30 degrees and sunny, leading to violent thunder storms, torrential rain, and today’s wet drizzle. This demonstration of the changeable weather in Canada’s Rockies gives me a new appreciation for the early explorers of these mountains. In some ways they had it easier than today’s field geologists and paleontologists, in that they had pack horses to carry their gear (several participants at today’s conference have lamented not having their own pack horses). But clearly it was not easy, negotiating up scree slopes of shale, through dense forest, in at times horrendous conditions.

When Charles Doolittle Walcott arrived on the scene in 1909 (the event which this conference is commemorating) he had his family with him – including his wife, in full skirt, and some of his children. How they managed I’ll never know.

Desmond Collins opened today’s talks with an historical account of Walcott’s adventures – a version of which will appear, with further details and a more modern take on the shale’s significance – in an essay in the 20 August edition of Nature (closer to the actual date of Walcott’s discovery of Burgess Shale fossils, which was 31 August 1909).

But though history looms large at this conference, which is held close to Walcott’s Burgess Shale discovery, the science being presented here is on a broader topic: the Cambrian explosion – the eruption of a vast number of new forms of life, including most animal groups alive today, starting some 530 million years ago.

Posted on behalf of Nicola Jones

100 years ago this month, the fantastically-named geologist Charles Doolittle Walcott wandered up into the Canadian Rockies and stumbled on one of the world’s most amazing fossil beds – the Burgess Shale. In those rocks, Walcott and those following him found a stunning collection of preserved soft-bodied animals from 505 million years ago, from worms to jellyfish to things unknown on modern Earth. For decades, it stood as essentially the only showcase of animals from the Cambrian – a time when life exploded into many different (and often odd) lifeforms.

I’m in Banff, Canada, this week for the commemorative conference of this event (from 4-7 August), blogging talks on everything from water column-chemistry to modern fossil finds. Simon Conway Morris will be there, as well as other big names in this field. I’m keen to see what they have to say. And, to top it all off, I’ll be heading out on a hike to the Burgess Shale itself (weather permitting), so will hopefully have some photos for you of that. If I’m lucky I’ll stumble on something even stranger than what Walcott found… but no hammers are allowed, and I won’t be bringing any fossils home with me.

Posted on behalf of Nicola Jones