Burgess Shale

The Royal Ontario Museum says it has discovered the oldest-known swimming jellyfish in the fossil record from specimens collected at the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies.

What that 2018 dig revealed was something that stood out even in the bizarre world of the Burgess Shale, an outcrop of 500-million-year-old rocks in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia that is chock-a-block with fossils from the earliest days of complex life on Earth.

Tiny eyes blinking at him from the rockface of the Burgess Shale drew Jean-Bernard Caron to the fossil of the oldest known ancestor of today's spiders and scorpions.

The tiny remains of an extinct bug-like creature discovered at British Columbia's 500-million-year-old Burgess Shale fossil deposit add a new branch to the evolutionary tree of life, says a PhD student who tracked down the organism's development.