In 1909, Charles Doolittle Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian, literally stumbled upon the twentieth century’s most revolutionary fossil discovery.
Within the stones of the Burgess Shale, thousands of feet high in the Canadian Rockies, lay a treasure trove of middle Cambrian-era fossils, including many previously unknown animal forms, preserved in exquisite detail.
The discovery exposed a yawning gap in the evolutionary chain and raised more questions than Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection could possibly answer.
Learn more about the discovery of the Burgess Shale and other startling details that textbooks leave out.
Read Darwin’s Doubt.
Image: Walcott excavating at Burgess Shale/Wikipedia.