Day 12 – Mike had arranged a hike up into  the Mt. Stephen shale.  This is a UNESCO world heritage site and hikers are only allowed into the area in the company of a guide.  The richest Cambrian mud deposits are further restricted (you’ll see a chain enclosure in the pictures of the shale areas at the top) and we met a Parks Canada staffer patrolling the area at the top.  This was 14 km roundtrip, and 700 m up.  Lyra (on only her second hike ever) made it to within 50 m of the shale.

The Stephen shale and the Burgess shale (across the valley) are two of the few places in the world where fossils of the softer body parts of Cambrian animals have been discovered.  (Plants–the land-dwelling kind with vascular tissues–did not develop until the later Silurian era).   Stephen Jay Gould has a fascinating book–Wonderful Life (1991)–in which he uses the Burgess shale animals to argue for chance playing a major role in evolution:  e.g. there’s nothing inevitable about the arrival of vertebrate humankind on the scene.  

All the fossils pictured are ones that are lying around on the mountainside.  The two fossils pictured that aren’t trilobites: the shrimp-like one is part of an Animalocarus and the other is a sponge.