Did salmon and sturgeon emerge from the depths of the Cambrian seas? Have crabs always looked like crabs and worms like worms?
Visitors can find the answers to these and more questions at a new exhibit opening Saturday at Burke Museum in Seattle.
“The Burgess Shale: Evolution’s Big Bang” is a traveling Smithsonian exhibit of fossils.
“These are the groups that gave us all the animals on earth and animals in the sea today,” museum curator of paleontology Liz Nesbitt said.
The soft-bodied, palm-size fossils were discovered in 1909 at the Burgess Shale excavation site high in Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia.
Dating back 505 million years, these fossils show a diversity of life forms that has never been seen at any other paleontological site, Nesbitt said.
“Everything is really tiny,” Nesbitt said. “We have a couple of big predators, but most of them are small.”
Two predators have been discovered at the site: the opabinia and the anomalocaris, Nesbitt said.
“The smaller one is opabinia,” she said. “It has five eyes, looks a little like a shrimp and has a tube that comes out from its mouth with a pincher attached to the end.
“We think it would grab other animals and eat them.
“We don’t have anything today with five eyes or a single appendage,” Nesbitt said.
With most of the fossils fitting in the palm of a hand, the anomalocaris is unusual because of its larger size, Nesbitt said.
“It’s over a foot long,” she said. “It looks sort of like a shrimp. It has a big central mouthpiece used for chewing.
“We can see where trilobites had been bitten by this animal,” she said. “It was definitely a fierce, fierce predator. Once animals got big enough to become predators, they had to develop.”
The Burgess Shale site is still actively excavated by a handful of scientists and researchers.
“The mud seems to have been without any oxygen so it didn’t eat the bodies,” Nesbitt said. “That’s why they are so preserved.”
Nesbitt said that what makes these creatures so important is that they emerged during “a time when animals were really getting going.”
“Most of them are extinct and we’ll never see them again,” she said. “They’re really unusual. Some of them are really bizarre and they’re so different from anything we have today.”
Despite their small size, their effect has been important in the evolution of all animals, she said.
“Evolution just glommed on to a few body-plans, but here there’s so many. Some have called it ‘evolution’s experiments.’ “
Each creature found in the Burgess Shale is an invertebrate, an animal without a backbone, although there is one animal that is thought to be the ancestor of animals with backbones, she said.
“The pikaia looks wormy, and it’s very, very tiny. But, it does have the prototype of a backbone column,” Nesbitt said. “All fishes came from that little pikaia.”
None of the animals that were discovered in the Burgess Shale exist today, but there are a number of creatures that looked like shrimps, crabs and worms.
“We have lots of marine worms that do different things,” Nesbitt said. “And there are the sponges.”
The animals were specific to tropical regions, which included China, Greenland, Nevada and California, Nesbitt said.
“We’re finding the same things in other places around the world,” she said. “They’re all the same, and that’s what’s so fascinating. This is what populated all of the tropical seas of the world at the time.”
Because the exhibit features fossils that are very different from dinosaurs, Nesbitt said kids will be interested in the museum’s latest offering.
“One of the reasons we got this exhibit is because it’s from the Smithsonian,” Nesbitt said. “They take subjects that are really hard to describe and make them accessible.
“People should come and see what’s happening.”
Reporter Tanya Sampson: 425-339-3479 or tsampson@heraldnet.com.
“The Burgess Shale: Evolution’s Big Bang”
The traveling Smithsonian exhibit comes to Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture beginning Saturday through March 6.
A family day on Saturday features a create-your-own-creature station, a creature coloring activity, and a human timeline activity where children chart the evolution of life on earth on the outline of their bodies.
Storytellers will share dinosaur stories and guides will conduct hourly tours of the newest exhibit.
Hours: Family day, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
Admission: $8 adults, $6.50 seniors, $5 students.
Where: The Burke Museum is at the University of Washington, 45th Street and 17th Avenue NE, Seattle.
Information: 206-543-5590, www.burkemuseum.org.
“The Burgess Shale: Evolution’s Big Bang”
The traveling Smithsonian exhibit comes to Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture beginning Saturday through March 6.
A family day on Saturday features a create-your-own-creature station, a creature coloring activity, and a human timeline activity where children chart the evolution of life on earth on the outline of their bodies.
Storytellers will share dinosaur stories and guides will conduct hourly tours of the newest exhibit.
Hours: Family day, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
Admission: $8 adults, $6.50 seniors, $5 students.
Where: The Burke Museum is at the University of Washington, 45th Street and 17th Avenue NE, Seattle.
Information: 206-543-5590, www.burkemuseum.org.
Burgess Shale
If seeing the fossils at Burke Museum isn’t enough, The Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation, in partnership with Yoho National Park, hosts educational hikes for visitors from July 1 through Sept. 15.
The 12-mile round-trip hike gains 2,500 feet in elevation and takes approximately 10 hours to complete.
For additional information, visit www.burgess-shale.bc.ca.
Field, B.C.: The closest city to the Burgess Shale site; www.britishcolumbia.com.
Yoho National Park: www.parkscanada.gc.ca.
Burgess Shale
If seeing the fossils at Burke Museum isn’t enough, The Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation, in partnership with Yoho National Park, hosts educational hikes for visitors from July 1 through Sept. 15.
The 12-mile round-trip hike gains 2,500 feet in elevation and takes approximately 10 hours to complete.
For additional information, visit www.burgess-shale.bc.ca.
Field, B.C.: The closest city to the Burgess Shale site; www.britishcolumbia.com.
Yoho National Park: www.parkscanada.gc.ca.
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