As far as beauty is concerned, Canada's Rocky Mountains can compete with other scenic locations around the world. However, these mountains have another claim to fame which makes them unique. A relatively small ridge between Mount Field and Mount Stephen in Yoho National Park contains a very remarkable collection of fossils.

It was in 1909 that Charles Walcott of the Smithsonian Institution noticed an unusual fossil. It was the discolored, extremely thin remains of a soft-bodied marine creature. Now wait a minute, he must have thought, what we normally find as fossils are the hard parts such as shell or bone from once living creatures! So what was this? Intrigued, Walcott returned to British Columbia and the area known as the Burgess Shale Formation for several summers. He found a whole collection of soft-bodied creatures previously unknown to science and shipped his finds off to the Smithsonian in the United States.

In the 1960s, British scientists collected more fossils from the Burgess Shale. Then, beginning in 1975, scientists from the Royal Ontario Museum have collected fossils and published their results on an ongoing basis. Such continuous effort and long-term studies are justified by the insights these fossils provide.

An Explosion of Body Types⤒🔗

Based on Walcott's fossil finds, scientists coined the term "Cambrian Explosion." What was there about the Burgess Shale fossils that seemed similar to an explosion?

The key is to note that explosions are sudden and powerful. The fossils from the Burgess Shale were from the Cambrian layer in the geological column, and what these fossils seemed to evidence were fully formed complex creatures, without any evolutionary ancestors. If we dig below Cambrian rocks all we find in those sediments are microbes. So the sudden appearance, in the Cambrian rock layers, of a vast array of different kinds of complex animals was surprising. It was as if these complex life forms had just, suddenly, "exploded" into being. So Walcott's finds drew attention.

According to evolutionary expectations, these complicated creatures should have slowly arisen from simpler organisms. But no evidence of these simpler ancestors could be found in them rocks lower down (older) than the Cambrian rocks. These ancestors are not there. How did this amazingly diverse collection of different body plans appear all at once?

No Answer to the Mystery←⤒🔗

Various scientists have described how surprising the Cambrian Explosion is (as discovered initially from the Burgess Shale). Stephen Jay Gould, for example, declared:

Darwin has been vindicated by a rich Precambrian record, all discovered in the past thirty years. Yet the peculiar character of this evidence has not matched Darwin's prediction of a continuous rise in complexity toward Cambrian life, and the problem of the Cambrian Explosion has remained as stubborn as ever... Wonderful Life

Similarly Simon Conway Morris declared in 1993 that the emergence of many-celled animals in Cambrian rocks remains "the salient mystery in the history of life." (Nature, 361, Jan. 21).

Naturally scientists like to speculate about what could have caused an evolutionary process to go into astonishing overdrive. And there was an additional factor for them to try to explain. After the Cambrian explosion, this overdrive seems to have stalled. Gould articulated the conundrum in his book Wonderful Life. Regarding the Cambrian Explosion he wrote: "Since then, more than 500 million years of wonderful stories, triumphs and tragedies, but not a single new phylum, or basic anatomical design, added to the Burgess complement."

What we actually see in the Burgess Shale, Gould says, is the opposite of evolutionary expectations. Instead of an evolutionary tree, with simple life at the bottom branching out into ever more complex and more varied forms as time progresses, we have varied and complex forms suddenly appearing in the Cambrian.

More and More Fantastical Creatures Found←⤒🔗

The Burgess Shale was the first discovery of soft-bodied fossils of fantastic descriptions. Now we know about several more sites, and these have shed even more light on the kinds of creature which made up these marine communities.

1950s in Australia←↰⤒🔗

It was in Australia in the 1950s that the next Burgess Shale community of marine organisms was found fossilized at Emu Bay on Kangaroo Island. The community was judged to have been deposited earlier (in secular estimates, 10 million years earlier than the Canadian fossils). This site included a typical collection of Burgess Shale type organisms including the large predator Anomalocaris, which could grow to one meter or more.

1980s in China and Greenland←↰⤒🔗

Then in 1984 two amazing sites were discovered with similar Burgess Shale communities of marine fossils. These were Chengjiang in Yunnan Province, China, and Sirius Passet in Greenland. Both these communities lie at a very low level in the rocks, judged by secular estimates to be about 15 million years older than the Burgess community. Both contain similar communities but with new types as well. Chengjiang, the oldest site, includes Misszhouia, a soft-bodied relative of trilobites, and Primicaris (another soft-bodied arthropod or animal with a jointed outside skeleton such as shrimp). Also there was Myllokunmingia (possibly a jawless fish), and another similar organism with a backbone. Sirius Passet, for its part, exhibited a moderate number of arthropods (including trilobites and crustaceans), and sponges and worms with spiny exteriors. These worms are found at Burgess, too, but not at other similar sites.

1990s in Morocco←↰⤒🔗

In the late 1990s, several sites were found in southeastern Morocco, called the Fezouata community. The interesting thing about the Moroccan fossils is that they are considered very much younger ("30 million years" younger) than Burgess, and about 45 million years younger than Chengjiang. The rock in Morocco is not even considered Cambrian, but a higher lying category called Ordovician. The Burgess creatures were believed to have become extinct, missing from any rocks above mid-Cambrian levels, but here many were found along with other newly occurring Ordovician creatures like horseshoe crabs. These latter animals are famous as "living fossils," occurring today along seashores such as the Atlantic coast in the United States. Curiously, no animal with a backbone was found in the Moroccan deposits although some are found at lower levels at other sites

Today in North America←↰⤒🔗

But the discoveries just keep coming!! In 2012 a Burgess type community was found at Marble Canyon, in Kootenay National Park, about 40 km from the original Walcott quarry. Scientists consider the Marble Canyon fossils only slightly younger than Burgess, but "shockingly" different in what is present.

One of the key differences between the Walcott Burgess community and Marble Canyon is that the latter contains creatures found in the much lower lying fossil community in China. For example, the arthropods Misszhouia and Primicaris were previously known only from China. As far as animals with backbones are concerned, the Burgess Shale exhibits much lower diversity than the lower lying Chinese beds. The Marble Canyon site, however, has yielded many specimens of Metaspriggina (with backbone), previously known only from two poorly preserved specimens from the Walcott quarry. Overall, the preservation and appearance of the fossils at Marble Canyon are remarkably similar to the Chinese fossils that lie at a much lower level.

Evolutionists Scratching their Heads←⤒🔗

It is evident that the various characteristics of these Burgess type communities do not fit with evolutionary expectations. As expert Desmond Collins declared in 2009, the centenary of the discovery of Walcott's quarry:

Additional Cambrian material is now coming from the Chenjiang fauna in China (particularly new chordates, the group that includes humans), and the Sirius Passet fauna in Greenland. Along with the Burgess Shale animals, they demonstrate that virtually all animal groups alive today were present in Cambrian seas (emphasis mine).Nature 460 Aug. 20

Up until the late 1990s, no Burgess-type creatures had been found at levels higher than the Walcott quarry. Scientists believed that these creatures were extinct above this point. But now similar creatures have been found along with organisms that were supposed to have evolved long after the middle Cambrian layers. This meant that absence from the fossil record did not necessarily mean that organisms were extinct. So Burgess and the much higher Fezouata community included some types of organism in common. Marble Canyon and the much lower Chenjiang communities were similar. In addition, chordates (animals with backbones), common in the lowest Chinese deposits, but missing from the highest Moroccan deposits, and pitifully few in the Walcott quarry, were well represented at Marble Canyon. The take-home lesson is that it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions about the fossil record based on presence or absence of particular specimens or collections of specimens.

Incredibly Complex Animals←⤒🔗

As the first Cambrian community discovered, the Walcott quarry set the benchmark for studies on the nature of the community. By far the most striking organism turned out to be Anomalocaris (means weird claws). This creature, in shape, was like a flattened horizontal lying teardrop with the head at the fat end and with large intimidating looking appendages (like claws) extending from the head.

The creature had prominent eyes and swam by means of flaps all along each side. The first ones described were up to one meter long, but now specimens from China and Morocco have been discovered which were even larger. Specialists still considered the creature as "primitive" because it was found at the lowest levels in the rock record. Then surprising results started to be published.

Specialists soon declared that Anomalocaris was a top predator (catching other animals), but how sophisticated did it need to be to fulfill this role? The answer is "very sophisticated." A study from Emu Bay, Australia, discovered fossilized eyes, about two to three cm in diameter, with at least 16,000 closely packed individual lenses per eye (Nature 480 Dec. 8/11). Eyes with these characteristics rival "the most acute compound eye in modern arthropods" (such as spiders, dragon flies and lobsters). The authors conclude that Anomalocaris was a highly visual top predator. They further reflect that such "processing of visual information would have required optic neuropils (nerves) and brain to be of comparable complexity to crown-group (that is, modern) arthropods." Obviously these creatures, which evolution theory would expect to be uncomplicated, were instead as beautifully designed as our best modern creatures.

A study from Greenland provides even more information on how wonderfully designed the anomalocarids were. The Burgess Shale specimens had stout spines on the front appendages. These were suitable for impaling large free-swimming prey. A similar creature, Amplectobelua, from China, had pincer-like appendages, good for grabbing large slow-moving victims. Then another type, called Tamisiocaris from Greenland, exhibited appendages specialized to function as sweep nets to catch small swimming creatures like water fleas or krill (Nature 507 Mar. 27/14). Thus these anomalocarids demonstrated a wide range of strategies to exploit different prey. The authors point out that large animals are only able to exploit small swimming prey when the latter are present in huge numbers. The conclusion of the study was that the ecology of the community was entirely modern. As the technical article declared:

The Cambrian pelagic (swimming) food web was therefore highly complex, containing multiple trophic (feeding type) levels, including pelagic predators and multiple tiers of suspension feeders. This underscores the remarkable speed with which a modern food chain was assembled during the Cambrian explosion.

Another creature, Fuxianhuia from China, was initially declared to be primitive, based on its appearance and its location in the rock record (Science 268 June 2/95). However, recently imaging technology has allowed scientists to peer under the surface layers of some fossils. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that, "Because of well-supplied blood vessels to its brain, we can assume this was a very active animal capable of making many different behavioral choices" (Phys. Org. April 7/14). Such research led to the conclusion that Fuxianhuia enjoyed as sophisticated a brain as most modern crustaceans (Nature 490 Oct. 11/12). The interesting  thing is that some modern arthropods such as the water flea Daphnia (classified in the group Branchiopoda) have much less fancy brains. If the earliest appearing arthropods enjoyed such good brains, what happened to the water flea relatives? The technical article in Nature suggested that in their descent, these latter creatures "underwent evolutionary reduction and character reversal." In other words, these animals went backwards from a modern "advanced" condition in the beginning. Another Chinese arthropod, called Alacomenaeus, was discovered to exhibit a nervous system like that of the group Chelicerata (which includes spiders and horseshoe crabs). An article in Nature thus declared:

Alalcomenaeus and Fuxianhuia protense demonstrate that the two main configurations of the brain observed in modern arthropods, those of the Chelicerata (such as spiders) and Mandibulata (such as lobsters), respectively, had evolved by the early Cambrian.Nature 502 October 17/13

Taking stock of all this, we realize that the scientific literature tells us that all the elaborate body plans that we see in animals today, all appeared suddenly, and we see them preserved in Cambrian rocks. There was no time for an evolutionary process. Not only that, but this marine community was as sophisticated in its ecological relationships as any community that we see today. And the most exciting thing is that in their eyesight and brain design they were as fancy as the animals we see today with similar body plans. None of this fits evolution theory, which would predict initially a few small simple organisms.

An Explanation←⤒🔗

What we see can be called "sudden appearance." These communities of marine creatures were suddenly buried as a result of sediments carried off the land into the sea as Noah's flood began. An article on some arthropods from Emu Bay Australia, for example, declared that some of the fossils observed "correspond to either carcasses or specimens buried alive." (Palaeontology 52 #6 2009). That is how sudden the catastrophe was that buried these communities. The fact that we are unfamiliar with these particular organisms today merely demonstrates how much variety there was in animal communities on the pre-Flood earth.

Much has been written on the topic of how the Cambrian "Explosion does not fit evolution theory. The book Darwin's Doubt (2013 HarperOne) by Stephen Meyer and Darwin's Dilemma (a DVD from Illustra Media) both show that even when long ages are considered in the discussion, an evolutionary process still would not be able to produce the Cambrian Explosion.