";s:4:"text";s:1619:" Burgess Shale Fauna: Discovery of A Miracle. This group of fossils takes its name from the Burgess Shale rock formation, named by Walcott after nearby Mount Burgess in the Canadian Rockies. Nothing like them existed before and nothing like them has ever appeared again. Others, for example Opabinia and Anomalocaris , are considered more primitive and cannot be considered true arthropods (Euarthropoda). In fact these differences are so large many of these animals are one of a kind. The differences between the creatures that suddenly appear in the Cambrian are enormous. The Burgess Shale contains a wide range of fossil arthropod morphologies, many representing various stem groups of particular subgroups within the arthropods. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History currently houses over 65,000 specimens. This rare and exquisite preservation has granted scientists the unusual opportunity to view an organism in its entirety with remarkable clarity providing a window to the distant past and an insight on how these amazing creatures lived. The Burgess Shale is one of the rare locations in the world where both hard body parts and soft tissues have been fossilized.