‘Gasps All Around’: New Burgess Shale Fossil Sheds Light on the Evolution of Bigness

A Royal Ontario Museum fieldwork crew are seen extracting a shale slab containing a fossil of Titanokorys gainesi in the mountains of Kootenay National Park, B.C., in an undated handout photo. The Canadian Press/Ho-Rom, Jean-Bernard Caron

It was getting late and the team of paleontologists excavating a previously unexplored outcrop of the Burgess Shale was ready to call it a day. A camera crew filming the dig in Kootenay National Park had already packed it in.

Then one of the team members split open a large plate of shale.