The Discovery of the Burgess Shale Site on Fossil Ridge, British Columbia  

Cambrian fossils were first discovered in the Kicking Horse Valley by geologists dropped off at the CPR railhead at the top of Kicking Horse Pass in 1884.  Two years later, a carpenter working on the construction of Mount Stephen House in Field was prospecting for minerals on his day off, when he found rock “bugs” on the slope of Mount Stephen overlooking Field.  He showed them to Otto Klotz, an Ontario surveyor working along the railway line, who, in turn told a GSC geologist, Richard G. McConnell, about them.  On the 13^th of September 1886, McConnell found the site, now called the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds, and made a collection of fossils, including Anomalocaris claws.  This was the first Burgess Shale site discovered. 

Klotz sent his assistant to collect from the beds, and sent the fossils to a family friend, Dr.  Carl Rominger – the recently retired State Geologist for Michigan – who described the fossils in 1887.  This set in motion a series of rather controversial events involving, among others, Charles Walcott, then a palaeontologist at the U.S. Geological Survey; Byron Walker, a bank manager on the 1897 BAAS excursion; George Matthew, a New Brunswick Customs official; Edward Whymper, the first man to climb the Matterhorn; and Henry Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the British Museum (Natural History) in London.  These events eventually cumulated in Walcott and his family’s famous ride along Fossil Ridge in late August, 1909, where the Walcott Quarry was discovered. 

To a great degree, Charles Walcott was pointed to the discovery of what he thought was the geographic extension of the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds on Fossil Ridge, which he soon called the Burgess Shale.