Walcott locates the Burgess Shale beds

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. Charles Doolittle Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a palaeontologist of the Cambrian, located the fossiliferous beds on the ridge between Wapta Mountain and Mount Field during fieldwork in the Canadian Rockies. The often-repeated story of a horse stumbling on a fallen slab is probably embroidered, and published accounts differ over whether the productive beds were found in 1909 or traced to their source in 1910. What is not in doubt is what followed: Walcott returned repeatedly, opened what is now called the Walcott Quarry, and shipped tens of thousands of specimens to Washington, where he described them over the following two decades — assigning most of them, on the assumption that the animal groups of the world were already known, to living phyla.
3. Knowledge
4. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
5. Walcott locates the Burgess Shale beds
6. Connections
7. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
8. The Cambrian explosion
9. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
10. The Cambrian explosion
11. Walcott locates the Burgess Shale beds
12. The Cambridge re-description of the Burgess fauna begins
13. Evidence
14. Supports the narrative of Walcott's discovery and classification, the Whittington–Briggs–Conway Morris re-description, and the reassembly of Anomalocaris from three separately named fossils. Gould's own thesis about disparity and contingency is a contested interpretation and is not asserted as fact in this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked.
15. Supports the location of the Walcott Quarry on Fossil Ridge in Yoho National Park, the quarrying history and the site's protected status. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked. Neither the Parks Canada nor the Royal Ontario Museum documentation was opened, so this record stands on the institutions being the recognised custodians rather than on a retrieved page.