Burgess Shale fossils from Marble Canyon (Canadian Rockies) and the early diversification of animals

1909年发现的不列颠哥伦比亚省的伯吉斯页岩，对我们了解大约5亿年前发生的著名的“寒武纪大爆发”期间的早期动物多样化至关重要。2012年，皇家安大略博物馆领导的探险队在库特尼国家公园的大理石峡谷附近发现了一个新的伯吉斯页岩地区，位于原址东南40公里处，为我们对地球历史上这一关键事件的理解增添了戏剧性的新篇章。在大理石峡谷的宝藏中有Metaspriggina，这是世界上最完整的原始化石鱼（Conway Morris）。这些保存完好的化石将为了解这些生物群体的早期进化、多样性和各种体型提供重要的见解。我们将开发新的工具来超越化石标本的表面，包括使用回旋加速器技术来探测仍然嵌入岩石中的结构，这些结构太薄或太脆弱，无法用机械工具暴露出来。

Discovered in 1909, the Burgess Shale of British Columbia is critical to our understanding of the early diversification of animals during the famous “Cambrian Explosion” that occurred about half a billion years ago. The 2012 discovery by a Royal Ontario Museum-led expedition of a new Burgess Shale locality near Marble Canyon in Kootenay National Park, 40 km southeast of the original site, adds a dramatic new chapter to our understanding of this key episode in Earth's history. Among the treasures from Marble Canyon is Metaspriggina, the most complete primitive fossil fish in the world (Conway Morris s. These exceptionally preserved fossils will offer critical insights into the early evolution, diversity and variety of body shapes of these groups of organisms. We will develop new tools to look beyond the surface of fossil specimens, including the use of cyclotron technology to detect structures still embedded in rocks and which are too thin or fragile to be exposed with mechanical tools. The second objective involves unearthing new fossils through targeted fieldwork at various locations in the Canadian Rockies Mountain Parks, to determine the extent of the fossil deposits within the Stephen Shale Formation (the geological unit yielding Burgess Shale fossils) how spread out they are and the stratigraphic relationships of the different fossil assemblages within that formation. We will study how these fossil animals were related to each other, as well as variations in the organisms making up these ancient communities and variations in their environments.