08.02.09
The Big Bang of evolution
The Burgess Shale: Evolution’s Big Bang
A storied trove of fossils from a Canadian paleontological site is yielding new clues to an explosion of life on earth
By Siobhan Roberts
This ‘big bang’ has the look and feel of something ‘naturalistic’ but that cannot fit into the Darwinian framework.
Can Darwinists face reality and see the handwriting on the wall?
The Burgess Shale is Mecca for paleontologists. Charles Doolittle Walcott, the fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered this rich fossil bed a century ago, in the summer of 1909, and named it for nearby Mount Burgess. At the end of his first field season here, Walcott wrote in a letter to a colleague that he had “found some very interesting things.” Talk about understatement. The Burgess fossils tell nothing less than the story of the Cambrian explosion—evolution’s Big Bang—when relatively simple organisms rapidly diversified into the sorts of animals that live today. The exquisitely preserved Burgess specimens (most likely entombed by underwater mudslides) include the remnants of soft-bodied organisms, which are rare in the fossil record. The animals inhabited the ocean floor 505 million years ago, near the end of the Cambrian Period.