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More than half a billion years old, the fossils of the Burgess Shale preserve an intriguing glimpse of early life on Earth. They were first discovered in 1909 by Charles D. Walcott, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. This group of fossils takes its name from the Burgess Shale rock formation, named by Walcott after nearby Mount Burgess in the Canadian Rockies. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History currently houses over 65,000 specimens. The museum also has a permanent exhibit of the Burgess Shale fauna near the Dinosaur Hall. Since Walcott's original discovery, fossil deposits like these have been found in such widely dispersed areas as China, Greenland, Siberia, Australia, Europe, and the USA.
These fossils merit special interest for several reasons: