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Phyllopod Bed
The Phyllopod bed, designated by USNM locality number 35k, is the most famous fossil-bearing member of the Burgess Shale fossil ''Lagerstätte''. It was quarried by Charles Walcott from 1911–1917 (and later named Walcott Quarry), and was the source of 95% of the fossils he collected during this time; tens of thousands of soft-bodied fossils representing over 150 genera have been recovered from the Phyllopod bed alone. Stratigraphy and location The phyllopod bed is a 2.31 m thick layer of the 7 m thick Greater Phyllopod Bed, found in the Walcott Quarry on Fossil Ridge, between Wapta Mountain and Mount Field, at an elevation of around , around north of the railway town of Field, British Columbia, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. It is adjacent to Mount Burgess, where Walcott first discovered the Burgess Shale formation. Walcott divided the bed into twelve units based on the rock type and fossil content. Certain fossil beds provide reference levels and can b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
USNM
The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2021, with 7.1 million visitors, it was the eighteenth most visited museum in the world and the second most visited natural history museum in the world after the Natural History Museum in London."The World's most popular museums", CNN.com, 22 June 2017. Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities. The main building has an overall area of with of exhibition and public space and houses over 1,000 employees. The museum's collections contain over 145 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, the largest natural history collection in the world. It is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mount Burgess
Mount Burgess, , is a mountain in Yoho National Park and is part of the Canadian Rockies. It is located in the southwest buttress of Burgess Pass in the Emerald River and Kicking Horse River Valleys. History It was named in 1886 by astronomer Otto Klotz after Alexander MacKinnon Burgess, the Deputy Minister of the Interior at the time when Klotz worked for a railway construction. In 1892, James J. McArthur was the first to ascend this mountain. He was completing a survey of the lands adjacent to the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1909, geologist Charles D. Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale deposit of fossils with fine details on Mount Burgess. The Burgess Shale is a black shale fossil bed (Lagerstätte) named after nearby Burgess Pass, in which are found new and unique species, many in fact constituting entire new phyla of life, and even today some of these unique species have proven impossible to classify. The fossils are especially valuable because they include appendages an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trace Fossils
A trace fossil, also known as an ichnofossil (; from el, ἴχνος ''ikhnos'' "trace, track"), is a fossil record of biological activity but not the preserved remains of the plant or animal itself. Trace fossils contrast with body fossils, which are the fossilized remains of parts of organisms' bodies, usually altered by later chemical activity or mineralization. The study of such trace fossils is ichnology and is the work of ichnologists. Trace fossils may consist of impressions made on or in the substrate by an organism. For example, burrows, borings ( bioerosion), urolites (erosion caused by evacuation of liquid wastes), footprints and feeding marks and root cavities may all be trace fossils. The term in its broadest sense also includes the remains of other organic material produced by an organism; for example coprolites (fossilized droppings) or chemical markers (sedimentological structures produced by biological means; for example, the formation of stromatolites). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mineralized Tissues
Mineralized tissues are biological tissues that incorporate minerals into soft matrices. Typically these tissues form a protective shield or structural support. Bone, mollusc shells, deep sea sponge ''Euplectella'' species, radiolarians, diatoms, antler bone, tendon, cartilage, tooth enamel and dentin are some examples of mineralized tissues. These tissues have been finely tuned to enhance their mechanical capabilities over millions of years of evolution. Thus, mineralized tissues have been the subject of many studies since there is a lot to learn from nature as seen from the growing field of biomimetics. The remarkable structural organization and engineering properties makes these tissues desirable candidates for duplication by artificial means. Mineralized tissues inspire miniaturization, adaptability and multifunctionality. While natural materials are made up of a limited number of components, a larger variety of material chemistries can be used to simulate the same propertie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nekton
Nekton or necton (from the ) refers to the actively swimming aquatic organisms in a body of water. The term was proposed by German biologist Ernst Haeckel to differentiate between the active swimmers in a body of water, and the passive organisms that were carried along by the current, the plankton. As a guideline, nektonic organisms have a high Reynolds number (greater than 1000) and planktonic organisms a low one (less than 10). However, some organisms can begin life as plankton and transition to nekton later on in life, sometimes making distinction difficult when attempting to classify certain plankton-to-nekton species as one or the other. For this reason, some biologists choose not to use this term. History The term was first proposed and used by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1891 in his article ''Plankton-Studien'' where he contrasted it with plankton, the aggregate of passively floating, drifting, or somewhat motile organisms present in a body of water, primarily t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walcott Diary
Walcott may refer to: People * Walcott (surname) Places ;England * Walcott, Lincolnshire * Walcott, Norfolk ;United States * Walcott, Arkansas * Walcott, Iowa * Walcott, North Dakota * Walcott, Wyoming See also * Walcot, Lincolnshire Walcot is a village and civil parish in the North Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, England. It lies west from the A15, south from Sleaford, east from Grantham, and 1 mile north from Folkingham. The population is included in the civil pa ... * de Walcott family * Walcot (other) * Wolcott (other) * Walcote (other) * "Walcott", a song by Vampire Weekend from their 2008 self-titled album {{disambiguation, geo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morania
''Morania'' is a genus of cyanobacterium preserved as carbonaceous films in the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale. it is present throughout the shale; 2580 specimens of ''Morania'' are known from the Greater Phyllopod bed, where they comprise 4.90% of the community. It is filamentous, forms sheets, and resembles the modern cyanobacterium ''Nostoc''. It would have had a role in binding the sediment, and would have been a food source for such organisms as ''Odontogriphus'' and ''Wiwaxia ''Wiwaxia'' is a genus of soft-bodied animals that were covered in carbonaceous scales and spines that protected it from predators. ''Wiwaxia'' fossils – mainly isolated scales, but sometimes complete, articulated fossils – are known from ear ...''. References External links * {{Taxonbar, from=Q16985953 †Morania Prehistoric bacteria Burgess Shale fossils Wheeler Shale Cambrian genus extinctions ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyanobacterium
Cyanobacteria (), also known as Cyanophyta, are a phylum of gram-negative bacteria that obtain energy via photosynthesis. The name ''cyanobacteria'' refers to their color (), which similarly forms the basis of cyanobacteria's common name, blue-green algae, although they are not usually scientifically classified as algae. They appear to have originated in a freshwater or terrestrial environment. Sericytochromatia, the proposed name of the paraphyletic and most basal group, is the ancestor of both the non-photosynthetic group Melainabacteria and the photosynthetic cyanobacteria, also called Oxyphotobacteria. Cyanobacteria use photosynthetic pigments, such as carotenoids, phycobilins, and various forms of chlorophyll, which absorb energy from light. Unlike heterotrophic prokaryotes, cyanobacteria have internal membranes. These are flattened sacs called thylakoids where photosynthesis is performed. Phototrophic eukaryotes such as green plants perform photosynthesis in plastids t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927), Sidney Stevens Walcott (1892-1977), And Helen Breese Walcott (1894-1965)
Charles Doolittle Walcott (March 31, 1850February 9, 1927) was an American paleontologist, administrator of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927, and director of the United States Geological Survey.Wonderful Life (book) by Stephen Jay Gould published in 1989, Chapter 4 He is famous for his discovery in 1909 of well-preserved fossils, including some of the oldest soft-part imprints, in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada. Early life Charles Doolittle Walcott was born on March 31, 1850 in New York Mills, New York. His grandfather, Benjamin S. Walcott, moved from Rhode Island in 1822. His father, also Charles Doolittle Walcott, died when Charles Jr. was only two. Walcott was the youngest of four children. He was interested in nature from an early age, collecting minerals and bird eggs and, eventually, fossils. He attended various schools in the Utica area but left at the age of eighteen without completing high school, the end of his formal education. His interes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eldonia
''Eldonia'' is an extinct soft-bodied cambroernid animal of unknown affinity, best known from the Fossil Ridge outcrops of the Burgess Shale, particularly in the 'Great ''Eldonia'' layer' in the Walcott Quarry. In addition to the 550 collected by Walcott, 224 specimens of ''Eldonia'' are known from the Greater Phyllopod bed, where they comprise 0.43% of the community. Species also occur in the Chengjiang biota, Siberia, and in Upper Ordovician strata of Morocco. Walcott's original interpretation as a holothurian was rapidly disputed. Alternative affinities to be suggested, which did not stand the test of time, included the siphonophores and a coelenterate medusa. It takes the form of a round, medusoid disk (which originally led to suggestions of a jellyfish affinity) with a C-shaped gut trace. The gut is recalcitrant and can be extracted using Hydrofluoric acid. The organism is frequently found in association with the lobopod ''Microdictyon'', which is presumed to have fed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marrella
''Marrella'' is an extinct genus of marrellomorph arthropod known from the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia. It is the most common animal represented in the Burgess Shale, with tens of thousands of specimens collected. Much rarer remains are also known from deposits in China. History ''Marrella'' was the first fossil collected by Charles Doolittle Walcott from the Burgess Shale, in 1909. Walcott described ''Marrella'' informally as a "lace crab" and described it more formally as an odd trilobite. It was later reassigned to the now defunct class Trilobitoidea in the ''Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology''. In 1971, Whittington undertook a thorough redescription of the animal and, on the basis of its legs, gills and head appendages, concluded that it was neither a trilobite, nor a chelicerate, nor a crustacean. ''Marrella'' is one of several unique arthropod-like organisms found in the Burgess Shale. Other examples are ''Opabinia'' and ''Yohoia''. The unusual a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society Of London
''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'' is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society. In its earliest days, it was a private venture of the Royal Society's secretary. It was established in 1665, making it the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science, and therefore also the world's longest-running scientific journal. It became an official society publication in 1752. The use of the word ''philosophical'' in the title refers to natural philosophy, which was the equivalent of what would now be generally called ''science''. Current publication In 1887 the journal expanded and divided into two separate publications, one serving the physical sciences ('' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences'') and the other focusing on the life sciences ('' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences''). Both journals now publish themed issues and issues resulting from pap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
