This arthropod is one of the largest arthropods found at Burgess Shale.
What is Sidneyia?
100
This ancient landmass where the Burgess Shale was deposited became North America.
What is Laurentia?
100
This type of sediment hardened over millions of years to form shale.
What is mud?
100
These organisms found in the Burgess Shale are not normally fossilized due to their soft bodies and delicate structure.
What are soft bodied organisms?
100
This Cambrian creature had five eyes and a long proboscis.
What is Opabinia?
200
All arthropods have this common feature, making them much better specimens for fossilization.
What are exoskeletons?
200
This Cambrian super-continent started to slowly break up when the Burgess Shale fauna were still alive, creating a warmer climate.
What is Pannotia?
200
All of the Burgess Shale fauna lived during this geological time period.
What is the Cambrian time period?
200
The diversity of the fossils in the Burgess Shale is an excellent example of this natural occurrence where almost all ancestors of modern life evolved in a relatively short period of time.
What is the Cambrian Explosion?
200
This Burgess Shale animal resembled a rock with spikes, it has no living relatives.
What is Wiwaxia?
300
This word combines arthropods and lobopods(worm-like animals closely related to arthropods also found in the Burgess shale) in to one taxon.
What is Panarthropoda?
300
The creatures at the Burgess Shale first swam off the coast of a landmass that was located at this latitude?
What is the equator?
300
This is the process by which a sediment gets compacted and turned into a rock. This happened to the Burgess Shale during its uplifting.
What is lithification?
300
This type of fossil preservation was named after the shale, and can be seen in many places around the world, including Chengjiang in the Yunnan province of China.
What is Burgess Shale Preservation?
300
This now extinct animal could reach 6 feet in length and fed on trilobites.
What is Anomalocaris?
400
This Arthropod is the most common fossil found in the Burgess Shale.
What is Marella?
400
The climate at the time the Burgess shale was deposited was getting warmer and the sea level was increasing largely because of these two processes.
What are an increase in tectonic activity and melting sea ice?
400
Millions of years ago the Burgess Shale was deposited in a warm shallow sea, today however it has been uplifted and is located in these mountains.
What are the Canadian rocky mountains?
400
Because this sea cliff helped protect animals buried in mud from turbulent currents and other predators, soft bodied organisms were able to be preserved in a way uncharacteristic of most soft bodied organisms.
What is the Cathedral Escarpment?
400
This strange creature had sets of spiny legs on one side and spikes on the other. Until recently, scientists were not sure which were legs and which were spikes.
What is Hallucigenia?
500
These early arthropods were one of the most diverse groups of animals ever, due to their hard exoskeletons they were perfect for fossilization and are one of the most common fossils found today from the Cambrian period.
What are trilobites?
500
Because this marine creature lived in warm shallow seas, its presence in the fossil record of the Burgess Shale can be a proxy for the climate during the deposition of the shale.
What is a Trilobite?
500
Because the Burgess Shale lacks many radioactive isotopes, it can not be dated exactly, however we know the relative age of the shale using this method which relies on the fossil record and the law of superposition.
What is biostratigraphy?
500
These members of the phylum Chordata include mammals, reptiles and birds, and their ancestors can be found in the Burgess Shale.
What are chordates?
500
This worm-like lobopod creature was an early ancestor of the velvet worm commonly found in the Amazon today.