Paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott makes a remarkable discovery in the Middle Cambrian rocks exposed on the western flank of the ridge connecting Mount Field and Mount Wapta in western British Columbia, Canada: the Burgess Shale, containing tens of thousands of living organisms (60,000 to 80,000) in fossil form dating back 570 million years, 140 new species in all. However, the work will only be appreciated after a thorough revision of the analysis conducted in the 1970s.
