The Burgess Fauna

Overviews of the Burgess Fauna

• The Smithsonian Institution, which is home to most of the fossils Walcott collected from the Burgess Shale, maintains a Web page devoted to the Burgess Fauna.
• The Smithsonian provides also a gallery of photographs and reconstructions of the animals.
• Fossils of the Burgess Shale, from the Peabody Museum, Yale University
• Photographs from Pam Gore's site.
• URLs to images of the Burgess Fauna

The Chengjiang Fauna, Lower Cambrian, China

• Mysteries of the Orient. This is now a background piece by Richard Monastersky for Discover magazine, April 1993.
• Deuterostomes from the Chengjiang fauna: a review by Simon Conway Morris, originally published in New Scientist, August 2003.
• In late 1999, two jawless fishes were described from the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Fauna. This spectacular discovery simply underlines further the rapidity of the "Cambrian Explosion". The "dawn of vertebrates" at Chengjiang by Richard Monastersky in Science News 1999.
• Field images of the Chengjiang deposits of China From the Hooper Virtual Natural History Museum

The Burgess Shale Fauna, Middle Cambrian, Canada

• Reconstruction of the Burgess Shale environment
• Hooper Virtual Natural History Museum page on the Burgess Shale Site
• Andrew Macrae's site at the University of Calgary

Specific Burgess Animals

Wiwaxia is a worm-like animal that crept along the seafloor. But it was covered by little plates. In 2004 a paper on some strange late Paleozoic fossils found that they were plated molluscs like living chitons, but they were similar enough to Wiwaxia, and to halkieriids too, to place ALL these creatures as molluscs. It's not clear that they are "chitons", but at the very least, they are molluscs. Reference: Vendrasco, M. J., et al. 2004. Nature 429: 288­291. And you won't find it on the Web unless you or your institution subscribe.

The Hallucigenia flip is a brief account of how the animal came to be reconstructed the right way up, and be recognized as a lobopod.

Page last updated October 22, 2004

Links last checked, September 29, 2005.

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