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Walcott locates the Burgess Shale beds

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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.

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