Joe Moysiuk

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.

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.