The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture presents the Smithsonian exhibit, The Burgess Shale: Evolution's Big Bang, this fall. The exhibit tells the story of one of the most important fossil sites in North America: the Burgess Shale.

Located in the Yoho National Park high in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, the Burgess Shale fossils were discovered in 1909 by Charles Doolittle Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The fossils are more than 500 million years old and include the ancestors of virtually all living animals, as well as many unusual creatures unlike any known today. The Burgess Shale was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981.

The exhibit explores current theories about the "Cambrian Explosion" when a burst of evolutionary activity generated a sudden increase in the complexity and variety of animal life on Earth. Detailed descriptions and illustrations of the extraordinary life forms are combined in the exhibit with the stories and methods of the paleontologists who have studied them.

These extraordinary fossils lived in the shallow sea when North America was in the tropics. Many of the fossils of the Burgess Shale are among the earliest representations of modern animals. Others appear unrelated to any living life forms and their later disappearance presents an intriguing mystery.

The exhibit was developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History's Department of Paleobiology. Exhibition curator Douglas H. Erwin is a co-author of The Fossils of the Burgess Shale (1994).