Luxor Creek Outfitters - British Columbia Big Game Hunts & Guide Outfitting

An excerpt from "The Eastern Kootenay - A History of Exploration & Adventure," by Ken Tyson.

Aside from the human drama that has unfolded over the millennia, this land has borne witness to natural history far more ancient than man, going back to the very dawning of life on Earth. Great discoveries in the disciplines of geology and paleontology have made this area one of the greatest natural treasures on the planet. . . literally, the history of life on Earth has been preserved in stone for modern scientists to decipher and ponder.

Geologically, British Columbia presents a complex mix of different rock types and structures -- high alpine mountains and deep gorges -- which provide many rich and diverse mineral deposits. This was brought about by tectonic processes that began somewhere around 200-300 million years ago. According to modern theory, a series of "island arcs" were carried north and east along the pacific Plate, until they eventually collided, one after another, with the westward-drifting North American Plate. In turn, these "island arcs" stacked up against the North American Plate, fusing together and forming the diverse and rugged terrain we see today in British Columbia. The folding and faulting caused by these tectonic forces caused the rocks to be thrust upwards, and gave rise to the spectacular mountainous topography

seen today. The Luxor Creek Outfitters territory is located on the oldest of these arcs, known to geologists as the Foreland Belt, and sits alongside the Columbia River within the Rocky Mountain Trench.

Today, the rock walls of the Trench are encrusted with the fossils of ancient marine life; a stark contrast to the modern-day mountainous landscape hundreds of miles from the sea. 550 million years ago, however, this area was the vast basin of a warm inland sea, far closer to the equator than it is today, and teeming with varied species of tropical life. This important period of natural history has been preserved in stone in various places around the globe, but literally just over the ridges to the north of Luxor Creek Outfitters is one of the richest, and arguably the most important fossil deposit in the world, commonly known as the Burgess Shales. While the fossil-bearing rock outcroppings are fairly small, the specimens that have been found there have forced scientists to go through an agonizing reappraisal of accepted natural history, and revise many established theories of evolution.

The Burgess Shales were formed about 550 million years ago during the Cambrian era, which was also the greatest proliferation of multi-cellular life in the history of the Earth, known popularly as the Cambrian Explosion. The world's oceans were literally brimming with a diversity of animal life that was never before experienced, and has never since been repeated . . .and all seemingly appearing out of nowhere in a sudden explosion of life. What makes these formations so special and rare is the timing of the deposit being formed during the Cambrian Explosion, and the method by which the fossilization occurred, such that the Burgess specimens were preserved so well and in such completeness of form.


	Under normal conditions, fossilization usually only preserves the hard parts of plants and animals, such as the shells, teeth, bones, leaves, and stems. This process occurs when life remains are buried under layer after layer of deep sediments (usually deposited by flowing water or the ocean), effectively creating a low-oxygen environment, which greatly slows the rate of decay. In the case of a fossil shell, as the sediments pile up on the specimen, an impression or "cast" is created. Through geologic pressure and the passage of time upon the geologic formation that houses the shell, mineralization occurs, binding the sediment particles into sedimentary rocks such as sandstone and shale, As the original shell breaks down over time, the "mold" that remains after its final disintegration will be filled with minerals like quartz and calcium carbonate, effectively creating a perfect cast of the shell. In the case of the Burgess Shales, fossilization not only preserved the hard parts of the animals, but the soft-bodied parts as well, in such magnificent detail that everything down to the last filament on the body		of a trilobite, or the odd layout of Opabinia's head with its five eyes, is clearly visible. This is a very rare occurrence, and there are only a few sites in the world where fossils such as these may be found. In order for the soft-bodied parts of these animals to have been preserved, there had to be an event by which they were quickly covered by sediments, causing the light and oxygen to be all but cut off from the life remains. This process would allow the soft remains to decay over a great period of time, giving them the opportunity to be subject of fossilization. The prevailing theory as to how this rare occurrence happened is that there were massive storm-generated mudslides that suddenly inundated and buried vast quantities of these marine creatures, washing them over a precipice, known as the Cathedral Escarpment, and down into a deep canyon, over and over again. As a result of the manner in which the sea-creatures were inundated and swept into deep water, the bodies were coated with a film of fine clay sediments, which penetrated the soft body parts and greatly slowed the

rate of bacterial decomposition; the end result being that complete specimens were able to be fossilized.

The Burgess Shales are located in Yoho National Park, near the town of Field, and are found in what geologists call the Stephen Formation in Burgess Pass on the southwest side of the saddle between Mount Wapta and Mount Field. The first outcropping of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock was discovered by Canadian Pacific Railway worker Otto Klotz on the slopes of Mount Stephen. Klotz made a fine collection of the fossils he found, motivated purely by his own interest, however, his finds soon drew the attention of two Geological Survey of Canada geologists, R.G. McConell and George Dawson, who later informed Dr. Charles Doolittle Walcott of the discovery.

Dr. Walcott was the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and also a recognized leading authority on Cambrian invertebrate paleontology. Upon hearing of the new finds in Yoho, Walcott decided to visit the area in 1907. During the summer of 1909, Walcott was riding a trail high

above Emerald Lake below the ridge connecting Mount Field and Mount Wapta. A block of shale had previously fallen down and was obstructing the trail in front of him, forcing Walcott to dismount and move the rock out of the way. Instead of simply tipping the slab off the trail, Walcott instead used his rock hammer to split it open. the fossils he found there, and those that followed, continue to vex and challenge paleontologists to this day.

Walcott returned to the area in 1910 with his sons Stuart and Sidney. The party climbed the ridge above the trail where the original specimens were found, examining the rock strata as they went until the fossiliferous layer had been located. This slope later became known as Fossil Ridge.

Over the next month, the Walcott party quarried the shale and tumbled slabs down the slope to the trail below where they were loaded onto packhorses and taken to the Canadian Pacific station at Field. during the following fifteen years, around 30,000 blocks of the Burgess Shales, as they came to be known, were transported to the Smithsonian, yielding around 65,000


fossil specimens. The expanse around the Burgess Shale quarries has since been declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Dr. Walcott studied and attempted the first scientific classifications of the Burgess fossils, but greatly misinterpreted what he found. He basically	organized every creature he found according to known modern groups, viewing the specimens as primitive ancestors to species living today; when in actuality, many of the animals present in the Burgess Shales could not be classified based on life as it exists today. Many of the fossils could not be housed within any existing phylum, and seemed to represent new and undiscovered phyla of their own.	According to Dr. Walcott's conventional view of life and evolution, we should expect a single primitive ancestor to lead to a great variety of more complex organisms. The Burgess Shales specimens are just the opposite: At the beginning of life, there were a great many more structural designs than there are today. Sadly, Dr. Walcott passed away, never understanding the full magnitude of his discovery. Dr. Walcott's interpretations of the fossil specimens found in the Burgess Shales stood for more than fifty years. In 1971, Cambridge University Professor Harry Whittington published the first part of a complete re-examination of Walcott's findings. The end result was not only a radically different interpretation of the Burgess Shales, but also of the history of life in general and the astronomical improbability of human evolution. Whittington demonstrated that most of the fossilized specimens from the Burgess deposits do not belong in any known groups. The diversity of life was so astounding that the fossil samples from the Walcott Quarry alone contained a greater anatomical range of life then all known invertebrate life in all the combined modern oceans. The Burgess Shales have yielded specimens from all four major arthropod groups . . .but also thirty other arthropod species that are unclassifiable.