Kootenay National Park Described As ‘Huge” Fossil Source

Huge Fossil Site Found in the Canadian Rockies

Researchers looking over slopes in Kootenay National Park in B.C., Canada have been going through a treasure trove of fossils dating back 500 million years. The density of fossils being found at Marble Canyon has rivaled, if not surpassed, Burgess Shale, located about 30 miles away at the same park. Burgess Shale was discovered in 1909 and has since yielded more than 3,000 fossils.

Researchers started extracting fossils in 2012 at Marble Canyon. Since then, they have spent 600 field days at the Kootenay site and found evidence of 200 separate animal species. They spent two weeks recently bagging artifacts and came away with fossils from 50 species. Ten of those species have never been seen anywhere else, scientists said while noting they had just scratched the surface of species and fossil finds.

The new fossil trove was spotted in 2012. The rocks date back 100,000 years, so are younger even than those at the famous Burgess Shale. Researchers reported the fossils at Marble Canyon were better preserved, too. They’ve already revealed guts, tissue, corneas, retinas, livers, and hearts of different invertebrate animals, or arthropods. Many of the animals found have been astonishing, said Jean-Bernard Caron, lead researcher.

Until now, paleontologists had thought one reason the Burgess fossils were so well preserved was because they settled in thick deposits at the bottom of an ancient ocean protected by a submarine cliff. But the Stanley Glacier fossils weren’t formed in the presence of such a cliff, suggesting that creatures can be fossilized in amazing detail in other environments.

New discoveries are still emerging from the classic Burgess localities. In May of last year, after studying new Burgess fossils from one of the original sites, Caron and colleagues reported new details on a creature that may be one of the earliest known relatives of octopuses, squid and other cephalopods.