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Montreal Gazette A Canadian led team of scientists has discovered a fossil bonanza in southern British Columbia that sheds new light on the world famous Burgess Shale site 40 kilometres to the north and introduces a previously unknown predator from the dawning era of animal life. 
The discovery near Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park occurred in a band of rock where researchers hadn't expected to find Burgess-type fossils because it lacked an escarpment feature long thought to be key to preserving the remains of the Earth's earliest complex creatures from 500 million years ago.But at a spot in the Rockies just a stone's throw from the B.C.-Alberta border, scientists led by Royal Ontario Museum paleontologist Jean-Bernard Caron found a major deposit of Cambrian-age life forms typical of the Burgess Shale and highlighted by a newly identified member of the anomalocaridid family. They were the large, tentacle-faced predators that ruled the primordial seas during the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of animal life half-a-billion years ago. Because the fossils were unearthed in a Cambrian-era rock formation that's widespread in Western Canada beyond the Burgess-style setting, the researchers said the Kootenay find could initiate a wave of discoveries at similar sites. The Stanley Glacier find, the researchers write in the September issue of Geology, "expands the diversity and ecological range of the Burgess Shale biota, widens its known geographical and paleoenvironmental range" and "fills a gap" in the chronology of early animal evolution. "Owing to the discovery of several new species within a small geographic area during this preliminary phase of exploration, we consider it likely that future exploration and study will continue to yield new (species)," note the authors, including University of Saskatchewan scientist Gabriela Mangano and other researchers from the U.S. and Sweden. The new predator - named Stanleycaris hirpex in recognition of the Stanley Glacier location of the discovery - indirectly honours the 19th-century Canadian governor general whose name also adorns a Kootenay mountain peak and hockey's most famous trophy. The latest object paying tribute to Lord Stanley of Preston is perhaps not so elegant as his silver cup. Anomalocaridids were the largest animals on Earth in their day, with some species reaching up to two metres in length. The bizarre creatures are believed to have been agile swimmers and sported a set of shrimp-like appendages protruding from the outer part of a circular mouth that housed a ring of sharp teeth. Now protected within Yoho National Park as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Burgess Shale fossil bed is considered one of the planet's most important sites for the study of evolution. The B.C. fossils were created at a time when the future Canadian land mass was situated near the Earth's equator. The Burgess Shale creatures were preserved when an entire marine ecosystem was buried in mud that eventually hardened and became exposed hundreds of millions of years later in an outcrop of the Rockies. U.S. paleontologist Charles Walcott, following reports of fabulous fossil finds by Canadian railway workers laying tracks through the mountains in the late 19th century, is said to have tripped over a block of shale in 1909 that revealed the area's remarkable supply of specimens. Since then, scientists have gathered or recorded tens of thousands of fossils from the site, capturing in remarkable detail the rich diversity of organisms that suddenly filled the world's oceans a half-billion years ago, before their subsequent eclipse. Among the imprints of animal remains excavated from the Burgess Shale is one called pikaia, an eel-like creature that has been classified as the earliest known, identifiable ancestor of modern vertebrates, including humans. Last year, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the site's 1909 discovery, the limited edition Shale Ale brand of beer was unveiled at a geology conference in Calgary.
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