You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Amy Atwater.
And I'm Megan Wetherell, and we're two living scientists who
are weirdly excited about dead things.
From weird animals to weird geology, the Burgess Shale has
it all, but it isn't necessarily as unique as we thought.
In this episode, we talk about bizarre animals, the concept of
jellyfish jerky, and a world that just fossilizes
differently. Also weird things you can do to
worms for. Science like always, our podcast
talks about some disgusting stuff, so please read through
the content warnings before continuing.
I'm going to get us started off today by talking about possibly
the most feminist fossil takeover of all time, which is
the fossil Anning Vermis. Now, Anning Vermis is from the
Cambrian period, about 500 million years ago, and it's
found in the Burgess Shale deposits in Canada.
And the reason that it is such a great fossil and such a great
feminist takeover is, First off, it's named after Mary Anning,
which is great. And Anning Vermis is a preopulid
worm, which is a fancy science name for penis worm.
Penis worms are named not for what they look like in the
fossil record. We know what they look like now
because they still exist. They are a predatory worm that
lives in the ocean and looks like a Dick.
And they're pink. They're floppy, they're gross.
I will say that in the fossil record, they are slightly less
human penis E and more like terrifying cat penis E because
they have like spikes and spines and all sorts of horrific
better. Yeah.
This is a great way to start off.
Right. And the the cool thing about pre
appealing. Well, there's a lot of a lot of
cool things about penis worms, but this penis worm and other
penis worms in the Burgess Shale are really, really
extraordinarily well fossilized. They don't look like you just
took a soft fleshy tube and you squashed it in the dirt.
There's actually things like I think stomach contents are
preserved in some cases. They have exceptional
preservation, which is not characteristic necessarily of
penis worms and other soft bodied organisms, but it is
certainly characteristic of the Burgess Shale.
I always thought that this was something super unique to the
Burgess Shale. Imagine my surprise when I
learned that there are now as of 2014, which is the last paper
that I read on that listed a number, there are 50 sites with
Burgess Shale type preservation from the Middle Cambrian.
So Burgess Shale type, meaning super, super awesome.
Also you get penis worms. Well, you can preserve penis
worms if you get them. So soft tissue preservation.
So yeah, 50 which did mean that this paper in 2014 decided that
that was enough to start categorizing and ranking them.
So it was no longer, oh, you have exceptional preservation.
It's you have almost as exceptional preservation as the
purchase shale, but not quite as exceptional.
OK, you know we do it slow ranking and naming things.
As like the the epitome, the Burgess is still a number one.
Has anything come close to knocking Burgess off of its
giant mountain? Yes, there are a couple that
have come pretty close, but it kind of depends on what you are
looking for. So if you are looking for, you
know, the one of the hardest things to preserve would be
something like a jellyfish, which is super, super soft and
fragile and also not living on the ground, so harder to catch
and put in the dirt without having it decomposed, for
example, beforehand. So if you want really, really
nice jellyfish fossils, there was a new one described in 2019
called the Chingjiang biota, which is from the early Cambrian
of South China. That's different from the
Chengjiang biota, which is also Cambrian and also exceptional.
But the Chengjiang biota has incredible preservation of
Nigdarians, so jellyfish, anemones, that sort of thing.
So I would say that probably that would be a good challenger
for the Burgess Shale, as is the the Chengdian as well.
They have lots and lots of jellyfish in some of these like
more beautifully preserved sites, but it's not as unique as
I thought it was unless you're looking at deep time.
So if you're looking from the Cambrian to now jellyfish
fossils during the Cambrian, startlingly common, still
patchy, still not perfectly preserved, but really weirdly
preserved considering that pretty much since then, fucking
nothing. Like if you want penis worm
preservation, you're going to be looking for the little holes
that they take. You're not going to be finding
the actual penis worms themselves.
You're not going to be finding jellyfish.
You're probably not going to find anything that they do
actually after about the Cambrian because, yeah, that
preservation is exceptional and it is specific to that time
period for a couple of reasons that we'll discuss shortly.
Yeah, well, it wasn't necessarily like super unique
during the Cambrian. It is incredibly unique when you
compare it to all of the rest of time.
So still winning for sure. And.
That makes, yeah, I've never thought about it too much
before, but right, we talk about the Cambrian, like specifically
this is around 500 million years ago and a little, a little bit
after that, maybe some a little bit before that.
It's like 510 I think. Yeah, yeah, 585 O 8 is what I
saw a lot of spots as well yes and then I don't think a whole
lot about the penis worm record between present day and then
when you just told me that they're still alive and I'm
wearing my penis worm pants in honor of today's.
Which does have adding vermice on it.
Yeah, I made a penis worm Paisley print from my store.
You too can own this print and it has anning vermis as one of
the penis worms on it. I don't remember which one
Anning vermis is, but I'm sure it's the coolest one.
It obs. They're all amazing though and
the side says bioterbated and I have had a few people ask me
about that. Only one person got upset.
I did initially when I was designing that I had a pair of
shorts where I had bioturbated written across the ass because I
thought that was even funnier. But then I couldn't find very
good shorts. They were all, they weren't like
sleeping shorts. They were all like jogging
shorts but like that weird jogging material.
So it just it didn't feel like it met the vibes of scientific
equivalent to you need. It to be like Juicy Couture?
Yeah, exactly. Juicy Couture just bioturbated
across. Yeah, Juicy.
Couture doesn't write itself on like windbreaker style fabric,
you know? Like it's got to be a certain
type of fabric and I couldn't find it so I settled for the
sweatpants. Yeah, they're red.
I like them. They replaced another pair of
paleo pants that I had that said the Mammoth Site, which I also
found hilarious to have my pants say the Mammoth Site.
I just couldn't. I loved those pants.
I wore them into the ground. Yeah, exactly.
Like, get ready. Are you ready for all this
Jelly? Too bad it's mammoth.
I guess. Wearing the amazing pants and
excited for today. We've already touched on, you
know, soft tissue and exceptional preservation, yet we
have hinted around topics that we're going to get to really go
go into today with the the deepest time that we've talked
about. I mean, again, we are talking,
but we're just I'm going to go 500 million years ago, which as
we have established as mammal paleontologist, the oldest
mammal fossil I have ever personally worked on was
66,000,000 years old. So I'm a little bit out of my
comfort zone, which is exciting because you're going to hear my
take on birches fossils, which just not that of an expert by
any, well, I mean an expert enthusiast.
I'll, I'll start, I'll start with that.
And the Burgess, I mean, this we think of this time period is
also the Cambrian explosion. And this is when we see a lot of
visible life finally appear in the fossil record.
And in a lot of ways it does feel exactly that.
Like it was an incredibly rapid point for diversification and
evolution because we literally go from like no signs of
jellyfish to like a full bell shaped fucking jellyfish like
doing its thing. And it's this question of are we
missing the lead up to the some of these life forms, these
bigger, you know, bigger multi multicellular creatures?
Did we miss it or did it really happen that fucking fast?
And a lot of the evidence indicates that it happened that
fucking fast in a lot of ways. I realized as I was doing
research for this that I have always thought that the bird
Jess Shale and the Cambrian explosion were early Cambrian.
Like the fact that this is the middle Cambrian.
Little startling for me. A little hard to wrap my head
around, just like I'm missing 50 million years in what I thought
I was looking at. But you know, there's weirder
things about the Cambrian than that, so. 50 million years when
you're talking, you know, that's it's, it's a fraction of that
overall time, but yeah. I'll think you.
You would kind of think that it it would, and I don't know my
deep time well enough about this, but you would also think
that the beginning of the Cambrian explosion would mark
the beginning of the Cambrian because the Cambrian would be
defined by, you know, like a lot of times in our younger rocks,
it's very much described by the presence or absence of specific
creatures. Well, I guess that's kind of
like anyway, so so it's yeah, it is kind of interesting that it's
the middle Cambrian. It's like, well, what the fuck
is going on before that? I'm sure a lot of things that I
didn't read about for this, so apologies, yes.
Yeah, so tell me some of the cool organisms that are found
there. Woo, woo.
Yeah, for sure. And I'm excited to hear about
some of the sites too. So I've been, I haven't hiked up
to the quarries in Yoho National Park where the, you know, some
of the original fossils at the Burgess Shale were discovered.
And I've been lucky enough to go find trilobite fossils in the I
think it's the Wheeler Formation of Utah, which I'm pretty sure
is another Middle Cambrian site. So that's the first Organism.
I already told Megan I have a whole bunch of props so they're
not even photos though. But I think my little cute cozy
Ant, Nope, almost called it an ammonite.
That's not what this is. This is a trilobite.
So my I'm, I'm off to a great start.
As I already said, they made a lot of mistakes figuring out
these Burgess Shale fossils and I might make some mistakes
interpreting them for everybody, but this is a motherfuking
trilobite. Arguably one of the most iconic
fossils that you can your mind's eye can generate though.
Also, a lot of folks have no freaking clue what a trilobite
is. It's a beautiful quandary, but
it is an early marine arthropod. It had three lobes to its body,
hence trilobite. It would have had a shit ton of
icky little creepy legs around its sides.
Yeah, you forget about the icky little creepy legs when you look
at it, right? Like it looks so cute and then
you have to remember how many fucking legs it so.
Many legs, so many legs. Interesting, strange eyes.
Some had things sticking off. Yeah, yeah.
And things sticking off of their faces, their eye stalks and some
of them and appendages. And again, we have a site that
and multiple sites now that preserve like just insane
things, like to be able to get the detail of essentially what I
think of as a freaking cockroach of the Paleozoic.
Like to get that level of detail about something that lived that
long ago is really, really impressive.
Yes. So we had trilobites.
They're pretty, pretty standard. There wasn't a whole lot of
drama. I think trilobites had already
been known from other areas, but Burgess offered a chance to
again, see some of those soft tissue features a little bit
better. And they would have been, you
know, eaten weird dead shit in the in the muck and the all the
sediments and whatnot and been looking out for this
motherfucker right here that I have.
Yeah, such a nice plushie. Yeah, it's beautiful.
She's really giving me a whole puppet show on Zoom here.
I mean, I can't see her whole body, so it's not that good of a
puppet show. But like, you know, the, the,
the vibe is right. God, it's so true.
Yeah. So Anomalocaris is what I'm
showing you right now. It was one of, if not the
largest animal and Organism, I should say, in the ecosystem at
that time. We're talking almost a meter
long, so almost 3 feet. And for when you're talking
about critters that a lot of them we're talking about like
one or two inches is still pretty big for this time period.
Anomalocaris was a big chunky bitch.
So one of my my favorite aspects of birches is not only the cool
fossils, but the stumbling of humans to figure out what these
fossils are. And early on, they Walcott and
he Charles, he's the main, gets a lot of the credit.
I'm going to use some other names for other researchers
because that's what their names are, not Charles.
I don't know where I'm going with this they.
Really. White men are named Charles.
That's very well known, very well established.
It's Charles and my. Family.
That's very true. Solidly true, Very, very
accurate. Like both of my grandfathers.
Yeah. So they discovered this site.
It's high up in the Canadian Rockies.
Where in Yoho National Park is today.
I mean, absolutely stunning. I think the site is at over
10,000 feet elevation. I mean we are talking like very
mountainous area and looking for these blobby things on the sides
of mountains and they noticed that most of them preserve the
whole Organism. It was like a whole trilobite or
like a whole weird eye freaking looking around.
Whole penis worm, a whole coral, a whole sponge, something like
that, a whole weird shrimp thing.
And they kept finding these strange, strange other parts
that they couldn't quite wrap their head around.
One of them was this like circular disc shape that was
interpreted. To be.
It does look absolutely I that's what my favorite part of this
the stuffy is. It's got a great butthole.
She is currently holding up this 2 foot long stuffy and admiring
its butthole mouth. Oh, she's making out with it
okay. It wishes it actually it has a
really freaky mouth. So I'm pretty OK with not going
down that. So they it was first interpreted
actually. OK, so got to take a little
break. So my boy Stephen Jay Gould
wrote a book called Wonderful Life, which is funny in its own
that you named it that. And instead of it being about,
you know, this classic Christmas story, it's about the Burgess
Shale and the nature of history. And it is like not an easy read.
It's very scientific. It's one of his more well known
books and it goes into a lot of these amusing anecdotes around
the history of these strange creatures.
So yeah, they had this, they called it a jellyfish and it was
Petoia. And then they also had this
other strange 3 dimensional structure, lagagania or
something like that, that they thought was a sponge.
And then one of them was like, I don't know, I keep finding this
jellyfish and the sponge thing together.
So maybe they're actually different parts of the same, or,
you know, maybe these organisms aren't different organisms, or
maybe they're codependency. Or that's a weird way they're
like, Oh my God, you can't leave.
And then they also had these isolated, like shrimp arms into
the mix too. So they had all of these
different body parts and they were like, how does this work?
Do we have the, they truly interpreted it to be about four
different organisms before they found more and more of it and
could actually piece together that it was all Anomalocaris.
And the part that they had thought was the jellyfish is
actually its mouth. And the part that they thought
was laggy or something was like the torso of it.
And then because it had the, I said there's some weird shrimp
parts that have also been included in this.
And those were what had already been named Anomalacaris.
And since they were the oldest one named, Anomalacaris is the
name that's stuck. And it's a pretty fitting name
because it literally means abnormal shrimp, which is pretty
accurate as to what Anomalacaris is.
If you have not seen Anomalacaris, it looks to me
kind of like like a flying lobster with two shrimp stapled
to its face like that and like weird hammerhead eyes.
And a weird suction. Well, not suction.
But on the underside. But hold on.
And it really does. It looks like some kind of
creepy like mechanical device and it's all just like blades of
making up the mouth of I. I found some.
This is why sea cucumbers wish they could have for their
assholes. It would be like a fucking Pearl
fish guillotine garage door. Yeah.
Oh my gosh, that is so great. Yeah.
So the a nominal carrots. Yeah.
So we're talking a big predator. It didn't have any like, limbs
or anything like that. It actually just was more of a
swimming thing. So it wasn't crawling around on
the ground. And because of that, it doesn't
technically have jointed legs. So it isn't technically a true
arthropod because the defining factor of I, I believe
Arthropoda is this jointed leg thing.
So it's, you know, it hangs out. She's right there.
But OK. But then this group does call it
Arthropoda. So maybe I was just reading
something old around that. But there with all of these
creatures, it's just really fascinating because a lot of our
definitions are with modern groups.
And when you try to understand these origins of modern taxa in
deep time, they of course don't follow your rules because
they're freaking 500 million years old.
So that has been the funny part to work around is like, OK, we
got some arthropods, we've got some Nigerians, we've got some
like algae and we've got some sponges and whatnot.
But then trying to figure them all out where their modern
things live is really, really rare.
And I mean, the jellyfish are actually one of those problems
too. So with our jellyfish, we do
indeed have legit jellyfish from the Burgess Shale.
It's called Burgesso. Medusa Phasmormus.
Nope, that's wrong. Phasmormus.
Phasiformis, Phasiformis, There we go.
That's what I'm going to stick with, which I'm, I believe
literally translate to like the ghost jellyfish of the Burgess.
And it's like you were saying, we have had, we've had jellyfish
from the Burgess Shale for a really long time, but it hasn't
been until technology and proper study has actually gone about to
find that there are over 200 specimens of jellyfish of this
specific Burgesso Medusa that are known from the Burgess
Shale. A lot of them are.
You can see them on display at the Royal Ontario Museum.
I haven't been there, but that's what I read on the Internet.
They said that I could, oh, with a ghostly form.
And they said specifically, I know you're going to like this
because you're going to laugh at me specifically.
We thought it looked like the ghost from the game Pac-Man.
You know how I feel about. That yeah, I do like that.
Yeah, you. I know you don't like pop
culture references because you don't understand anything that's
not RuPaul's Drag Race, but that is cute, Pac-Man.
Yeah, it's so it's pretty fascinating.
And again, one article that I read was like, yeah, so these
are the oldest swimming jellyfish that we have, older
jellyfish that may not have actually gone into the polyp
form and actually been doing the free floating thing.
So this one argued that there are actually some other older
swimming jellyfish. But then the other article I
read was like, no, it's super debated whether or not these
518,000,000 year old jellyfish could swim or not.
So it's still debated about what the exact oldest Jelly is, but
there's a pretty good, it's a pretty good.
Well, it's definitely sometime in the Cambrian, we'll put it
that way. That keeps it nice and vague.
And they would have been doing very like the exact same stuff
that they were doing before. They would turn into this when
they swim and they can turn into their beautiful Jelly form after
their juvenile period and would have been doing their thing and
zapping SpongeBob. And yeah, yeah.
So it was fairly interesting to. I had just assumed that this was
like the oldest known jellyfish. And then it finds out.
Well, of course there are layers to everything and everything has
drama, like was it actually free swimming or not?
And again, when we think of something like a jellyfish is
kind of the epitome of just like a BLOB of an animal that when
you think of things preserving in deep time, that is kind of
the last animal that you are ever going to think could be
well preserved. It's just it takes so many
circumstances and it's from what I understand, it's insanely
rare, at least as you're saying, for all of time.
Yeah. So the preservation of soft
tissue in things that are squishy is pretty difficult.
And it's a lot more difficult now because we don't have
certain conditions in our ocean, but it's kind of debated as to
why it happened at all, let alone why it happened, you know,
50 plus times with all of these different Cambrian localities.
So when you look at these sites, one really consistent feature is
that you find them in clay, which is a really, really fine
particle. It's really, really small
particles. And that is incredibly important
for a lot of reasons. One big reason is it's harder to
compress clay than it is to compress things like sand,
because there's just no pore space.
So if you have lots and lots of little tiny grains, they don't
have any room in between them. So even if you put that whole
Burgess Shale like mudstone under a mountain, which we did,
and then lift it back up, it's not going to compress as much as
if it was bigger particles like sand or silt.
So clay is super important just for not squishing things.
It gives you a, a nice 3D preservation.
And it's why when we say things like we have a, a, a penis worm
with its guts preserved, we don't mean that the penis worm
got squished and its guts got sprayed out its mouth.
We mean, no, we have like a penis worm that had yeah, yeah,
it didn't, it didn't spray, it didn't squirt it.
It just, it got compressed, but not hard enough or fast enough,
not hard enough or fast enough to actually like become
roadkill, right? It's not, these are not
roadkill. They are like they're like
pressed flowers. Instead, they're given some
gentle compression. They're definitely still a
relatively flat fossil, but they're not entirely like
thrash. Because even though I personally
feel like looking at most of these fossils is kind of like a
Rorschach test, like there's just you're looking to see a
BLOB and I don't don't know how people interpret the blobs.
Yeah. But that would be so much worse
if these weren't preserved in clay.
The other thing is clay in and of itself can actually inhibit
bacterial growth. So it depends on the type of
clay. Different types of clay have
different properties, but clay can actually cause bacteria to
die. So that means you don't have
anything breaking down all of your fossil material.
Yeah. Yeah, clay is.
Clay is great. So you've got clay and then
another pretty consistent feature with these Burgess Shale
type deposits. So that's what they call because
Burgess, I don't think it was necessarily first, but it was
the fanciest, right? It was the one that first got
really recognized. So everything's called Burgess
Shale type deposits. But with all of these deposits,
you have mud that is very, very limey.
And particularly you get like this top layer that has a lot of
calcium carbonate. And they think that that was
just deposited from the water, but that it had to go pretty
quickly. And if you put calcium carbonate
into your mud, it hardens it up quite a lot, which A, continues
to prevent you from being squished and B, prevents anybody
from digging down to eat you. It also fills in the pore space,
which prevents more bacteria from getting into your body.
So basically all of these things were kind of working together in
order to ensure that these animals were really well
preserved. But it's not just happening in
one spot. It's happening in lots and lots
and lots of spots. And so each site does have some
kind of unique preservation qualities.
Some of them, for example, have like really strong piratization,
so the mineral pyrite, fake gold.
Some of them have mineral replacements.
So they look a little bit golden in certain Cambrian sites.
Others have phosphatation, phosphosph, phosphate, lots of
phosphate and it precipitates out and it preserves things.
This is, I guess especially common in like arthropod guts.
You get a lot of phosphate in there because there's phosphate
kind of naturally existing in their guts.
Although one paper I did read said that the mass balance
equation didn't seem to work out that there was more phosphate in
the arthropod guts than just would have occurred naturally.
So mass balance equation isn't mass balancing for some reason.
So still don't really know why you get so much phosphate.
And these are guts. But yeah, fossils don't follow
rules. So yeah, you get like this
exceptional preservation. And I will say that one thing
that originally was pretty strongly thought of throughout
all of these places was OK, these have to be deposited
without oxygen because if you have oxygen that feeds bacteria
that are decomposed. So a good way of making sure you
preserve everything is to make something anoxic, make it not
have oxygen. However, there's certain like
elements, I guess that will kind of vary depending on how much
oxygen was in the water when they were preserved.
And looking at those elements, some places, like I think
Wheeler Formation in Utah was one of the ones have signs of
like fluctuating oxygen levels. So sometimes they're anoxic,
sometimes they have some oxygen, but a lot of places, including
bridges, don't really seem to have a no oxygen problem.
So the way that they were being preserved doesn't seem to have
been related to oxygen. Can you think of something else,
Amy, that preserves animals really well by preventing
bacteria from growing in them, other than clay and oxygen?
We have touched on a few of these things.
I mean the dinosaurs hadn't evolved yet, so Hadrosaurs
asshole is off the table. There's no no chance.
They didn't need that big of a space anyways.
It's just small, guys. Well let's see.
Well you can have degassing events from lakes, volcanoes in
general, gassing, or even ashfall.
Those would be some of my guesses.
Ashfall will be good for putting silica into the water.
It covers things up really quickly.
But they think that at least in Burgess Shale there's another
mineral. So in in the Burgess Shale rocks
they find this mineral called herring bone calcite, which
herring bone is a beautiful pattern.
And herring bone calcite is specifically caused by
magnesium. High amounts of magnesium and
magnesium is often found in brine seeps.
So you know what a brine seep is.
Something super salty? Please tell me it's something
related to something dirty and filthy.
It's certainly dirty and salty. They think that maybe part of
the reason that the Burgess shales are so well preserved is
these are basically fucking slug jerky.
Like, these are like they're brined.
It's like salted pork, but, you know, salted jellyfish.
It's somehow super. The salt has is now
precipitating out and is like super super salty.
Yeah, yeah. So there's some indications that
the ocean in general was more alkaline than it is today.
So a little bit like more salty, more basic, but they think
specifically in places like Burgess.
There was also this input of brine seeps and I could not find
this was a real adventure in deep geologic terms.
Exactly. I could not find a great
explanation of what these sources were.
I found a couple that suggested that maybe this is coming from
when you get salt water kind of subducting someplace or going
underneath the continent. You can kind of, I guess super
saturate it with salt and then if it gets super heated, it
might come back up and you get like Hot Springs that are super
salty underneath the water. So that was one thing that I
read about but I didn't find, I thought.
That sounds terrible. Yeah, I didn't find anything
that was like, really obviously like, oh, yes, we have a spring
of deeply salty water that is coming here.
And I will say that in general, geologists who are writing about
the Cambrian, I'm gonna need you to do more drawings.
OK? I'm gonna need you to stop
assuming that anybody knows what the hell you're talking about
when you just say the word brine seep or my current favorite, mud
mound. Yeah, mud mound.
Do you have any idea how long I had to fucking look that one up
for? Like, that is such a generic ass
term that that was really hard to find.
It's Stromatolites 1 mud mound. Just say that right, Which is
like more. Complicated.
In some ways. Exactly.
It's like a mound of like dirt that was also produced by
stromatolites and thrombolytes and like bacterial mats.
So it's like bacteria, mounds of mud that kind of go up above the
water surface. But it was very hard to figure
that out, I will say. So, yeah, Brian seeps creating
some slug jerky, creating just like nasty salty things that are
already trapped in clay that is hardening really, really
rapidly. And all of those things seem to
work together really hard for the Burgess Shale in particular.
In a lot of other places, they think it was probably more,
maybe there were some salt impacts.
Some of them are oxygen. But yeah, herring bone calcite
was a cool one. That was the coolest, that there
were other minerals in that paper, but herring bone calcite
sounded really cool. They didn't have a great picture
of it, but it sounded really cool.
Sounds like they didn't have shit for images.
But we forgive you, geologists, because we love you.
I was like, we have to. That's why we just have to make
sure we have a choice. I I feel you, though.
I, you know, one of the things that sparked my curiosity again
on Burgess Shale was like, oh man, like I've really, I got to
write about it for my little children's book project.
And I too, you know, because we wanted to have like mode of
preservation and like, how did they get, how did the fossil?
It was really fucking hard to find any direct, like a recent
or like easy to interpret and like, I have a geology degree.
I feel like I shouldn't have for a site that was as that is as
famous as it is. I was pretty shocked that maybe
we're feeling the same vibe here on Yeah.
I just was a little surprised by, yeah, the lack of kind of
like synthesis divers or oversight things.
And yeah, it was really dense. Yeah.
You know what? Which is great.
You all have your expertise. Enjoy reading all of the
terminology of my Omamaya dentition paper.
Enjoy that you know you, but you don't.
You provide pictures. I did, I did, I did.
You still have to know what a hyperflexit is, but you know,
like that's all right, You can figure it out.
Because there's at least there's a picture, there's.
A picture. So you know, I I'm right.
I'm right there with you. For such a famous site, it's
surprisingly not well known in a lot of ways.
Like I was helping out with this, like we're getting ready
for our Dino Ridge quiz bowl, which happens every fall.
And we had this one question that we were trying to rework
work for the kiddos. And it was something around like
an an example of like a well preserved site.
And they were arguing about just how to say it.
And I was like, oh, well, could we say like the Burgess Shale is
an example of one of these sites?
And they all looked at me blankly and I was like, oh, OK,
I assume that. Burgess Shale.
Burgess is more well known than it is.
And then when Kelly and I did our road trip from Alaska to
Austin, TX for Graduate School in 2014, teen, we went through
the Canadian Rockies. It was beautiful.
And we stopped at Yoho National Park and I was like, cool, how
do I get to the quarry? How do I see the Burgess Shale
fossils? And they were like, oh, you have
to reserve a spot on a tour like months in advance.
And oh, by the way, that we did that.
Well, then I I I successfully tried twice, twice.
Yeah. The Rangers, at least one of
those times was super friendly and was like, no, we would love
to have you on one of these hikes, but you can't just show
up and expect to be able to go. And so then I looked at a map
and was like, well, I know where the quarry is, so I'm just going
to hike the other side of this mountain where there isn't where
you're not really supposed to. And the rocks are totally
different, by the way. So I dragged Kelly up this
fucking mountain like it was dusk.
By the time we got off this mountain.
I shouldn't tell the whole story about what happened to my poor
partners Tum Tum. But he didn't love that hike.
He still, he still talks about that hike like how fucking dare
you? 10 years ago, you remember?
But then we got to swim in this beautiful lake.
I think it's Emerald Lake right there.
And it was like gorgeous. And then we met up with these a
mate like we just happened to have a great human interaction
with these local Canadians who were very generous with helping
us with the problem that we were having after a shitty day.
No pun intended. Sorry dear.
It was we did not successfully make it to fucking anything with
the fossil. I guess that was my point is you
really do. As someone who kind of tried to
poach the quarry, I wasn't going to take anything, but I was
trying to hike there unauthorized.
Oh my God, is this going to get me in trouble?
Anyway, I didn't succeed. I totally fucking failed.
You can't do it. I'm just, I want to do it the
legal way. But it's very funny because then
I have, I've just found this book, Wonderful Life as Stephen
Jay Gould. And I open it up and there's a
fucking brochure in it from Yoho National Park about hiking to
the Burgess Shale with a receipt from a Missoula, Mt bookstore
like in 2014. So I then went to a bookstore,
bought this book. It's like on a mission, and I've
totally forgotten most of it except for some of these really,
really cool organisms. And another one that is super
bizarro is Opabinia. Have you seen Opabinia before?
Yeah, I've you. Of course you love a impression.
Oh, yeah. OK.
Well, I don't have an. I don't have enough eyeballs.
OK, we're going to do like. Make it work.
OK. Yeah.
It's kind of like a like a star nosed mole meets an elephant.
I like it longer. Longer.
Longer This is the one I I I fucked up.
I guess this is the one that because it doesn't have jointed
legs that it's somehow not a true arthropod.
But it's like a super basil like one of the earliest, if not the
earliest arthropod or you know, stem weirdo arthropod.
It's yeah, it is very ancient and that's why it doesn't look
like anything else. It doesn't seem to act like
anything else. It seems to be an Organism that
is now on. It's like a part of a a weird
stem arthropod group that now is totally extinct.
But it is a stop another soft bodied animal, maybe about 7 in
seven 7 centimeters long. So it had like flaps where it
could kind of like fly a little bit, kind of like the
Anomalocaris. And then it had Five Eyes and
then it had a trunk proboscis that is compared to a vacuum
cleaner hose. Like it was jointed like a
vacuum. And it had like fucking claws at
the end of that vacuum cleaner nose trunk.
And it would have used that proboscis to seek out small soft
food. And it would have.
Yeah. And it literally had a turn like
at the end of it was like 5 spines and just so weird and so
different from anything around today that we still don't really
truly, truly. And it's also one of the ones
that's super rare. Like I said, the jellies like we
have like 200 jellies. I was reading that of like well
preserved, like entire Opabinia fossils.
There's only a handful. So they're a lot more rare in
occurrence than some of. The sense, right, Because
they're swimming, they're not. Anything that was on the ground
is a lot more likely to be preserved for reasons we'll
discuss in a second, but anything that's swimming is a
lot less likely. It's like, you know, bats.
Bats aren't easily fossilized, but rats are easier.
Yeah, that's a good point. And that also kind of goes in
with the whole Anomalocaris debate was that they couldn't
wrap their heads around this idea that the Organism was
broken up into multiple pieces because so many of the others
were whole bodied. And I do wonder if that's a
different and niche space and the ecosystem again that yes,
well, maybe the ones that are already been thick on the ground
are going to be easier to complete.
But Anomalo Keras maybe was ripped apart or whatever by
another Anomalo Keras, I'm sure. Yeah.
And then of course, I've saved the best of all of.
Of the Burgess Shale animals for last.
Because it's fucking weird. It should be one of our mini
mascots of the show. And that is our friend
Hallucinogenia. Yes, Hallucinogenia.
It literally looks like a kitchen scrub brush.
Like, very much so. I've been cleaning a lot of baby
bottles. So when I saw some of the
pictures, I was like, yeah, yeah, I would.
That would work really great to clean clean some bottles.
OPA Benia was probably just using that to like, clean out
its snoot. Just deep.
Throating I mean, it has one of the best names.
It is a really not not only is it a fascinating creature it to
like the Anomalocaris. So it's just a bizarro story.
Essentially, though, it is this long tube of an animal.
You know, it can maybe get about two inches long, but usually
it's more around like an inch or so long tubular.
And it's got 10 up to 10 pairs of these little slender legs.
And then the first couple of pairs of legs are they're
featureless and the other ones terminate with fucking claws.
However, they also have spikes off of their back that are
thought to be used for predation.
But when the first scientists were describing hallucinogenia
back in the 1970s, they interpreted the spikes on the
back to actually be, they're like legs.
And that they're, instead of them being feet, they were more
like tentacles that would maybe be used to grasp at prey.
And it's what's really funny is that the guy who named this, of
course, what is his name? Conway.
Conway, Morris. Charles.
Would just this one's Conway, this one is Buddy Conway.
This is later, yes, but still strong with that.
So some of the like in that case, some of the tentacles
wouldn't be able to get to the high like supposed head.
And so then it was either like this network of like a train
kind of network of things to funnel things into the mouth.
Or he also proposed that maybe each of the tube feet had a
stomach on the feet and could just like from the different.
I mean, all of this is wrong. All of this is wrong.
They're trying to. Wrap their heads around how it
could have tube feet that weren't able to actually reach
the mouth and I'm like talk to T Rex.
I don't know fucking figured it out so anyway and they thought
that it was right like obviously they're like well it wouldn't
have been very good at moving around because it had straight
spines for legs. So we guessed it just used those
to sit in the mud and just kind of be there while they tried to
catch things. And it just turns out that they
had the animal upside down like Long story short as it.
Actually is make that much more sense, right?
Like hallucinogenia is so very weird.
But yeah. It's so weird.
And so he and that's why he named it Hallucinogenia.
So yeah, it's Simon Conway Morris and he named
Hallucinogenia because of the bizarre and dreamlike appearance
of the animal. So I mean, this is the 1970s.
He's like listening to Lucy in the Sky with diamonds and
fucking writing about Hallucinogenia.
I mean, what else was he up to? We all know just.
Doing Rocky Mountains in 10. Miles Oh God, yeah.
It sounds like it's a fucking grueling hike too.
So sounds like a bit of a bit of a rough time.
So I was just going to go over a little bit of the various
interpretations of hallucinogenia over the years,
which was at first it was like, hey, there's this kind of BLOB
thing on one end. Obviously the head, obviously it
walks on these spines and those legs.
Nope, those are tentacles with direct, with the Direct Line to
the stomach. You know, I don't know how
that's parsimonious here. I don't know how that was the
simplest explanation. And then, OK, like the early
90s, they're like, no, you have it upside down.
But then they put the head on the wrong and the part that
quote UN quote, decay fluids, which I love that take for a
butthole. And then finally they realized
that it was actually the elongated and that was the head.
And eventually in 2015, they finally were able to identify
eyeballs on on that part and I and confirm, in fact, that it
was that that's the OR like that's where its eyes and its
head would be. Yeah.
Like, I think you already said this phrase.
I was not familiar with the group of animals known as
lobopodians. Lobopodians.
I love saying it, though.
Love, love it. Did you know, did you know that
that means bluntfoot? And do you know that I don't
have the maturity to read that without?
No, I didn't know that. I mean, I knew that you don't
have the maturity to read Bluntfoot without like
immediately thinking of some jokes, but like, yeah, I did not
know that, that I, I literally came across the term Lumopodian
like 2 days ago. So yeah, hadn't explored the
meaning at all. That's fun.
I I I have discovered Snoop Dogg's favorite fossil
bluntfoot. You know, like this is.
I mean, bloodfoot hallucinogenia, yeah.
Like these are, these are animals that are just drugs.
These are just drugs, yeah. Yes, which is why paleontology
is so freaking fun. I mean, there's the kid friendly
stuff and then there's all the drug references.
I don't think that's what they were intending.
I don't think that someone back in the early 1900s interpreted
thought that I was going to interpret this as a total
cannabis reference. But so it goes.
So it goes. And so yeah, they are these
lobopodians, which are pan arthrans or pan arthropodians.
Like that's what the right is, not Arthrans and pan arthropods
include all modern day arthropods, tardigrades and
velvet worms today and are the group and lobopodians are the
group hypothesized to be the ancestor to modern true
arthropods, which are now like the most numerous group on on
the planet. Yes.
So it is a it's got a long history.
It was really, really. Yeah.
So now they're the studies now with hallucinogenia are looking
at, you know, how all of these characteristics that's insects
and spiders and crustaceans and all of these organisms have, we
can all be tied back to organisms like hallucinogenia
that we don't understand. And I really enjoyed the paper
or the blog that called them walking Cactus.
I thought that was a pretty perfect.
That is a pretty perfect name. I like that.
Yeah, And that's, you know, that was, I guess the point that I
was trying to make with some of my segments here is A, Burgess
Shale, really cool, rapid diversification of life.
B, we see the beginnings of the animals and organisms that we
have around us today. And C, we also see shit that's
like, what the fuck is this? Because it's 500 million years
old and it doesn't have any ties to anything today.
And it'd kind of be weird if it all did like, no things, things
go extinct. So it's just really cool.
There's just so many different things to get super curious
about. Thank you for listening.
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geologist Chris. Spencer Cover art provided by
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Praz Canal. Editing services provided by
the. Amazing.
Katie Bradley, hosted by and researched by us, Amy Atwater
and Megan Weatherall. Thanks for listening.
And if you're thinking, wow, what a weird and abrupt ending,
it's almost like you cut Amy off in the middle of a sentence.
I sure did, and that is because I then talked about geology for
30 straight minutes, which is a bonus that will be airing on
Patreon shortly. But otherwise this episode was
going to be unending, so it ends now.
Here you go, Thanks for listening.