Page 37 - The Dinosaur Book and Other Wonders of the Prehistoric World (DK-Smithsonian)
P. 37
More than 500 million years ago, the Burgess Shale was 444 million years ago. Some of the fossils were of animals
a muddy seabed at the foot of a coastal cliff. The water that had exoskeletons, such as these trilobites, but many
teemed with animals, some of which were buried by more were of soft-bodied animals that were very different
mudslides. As the mud turned to rock, their remains were from the creatures we see today, such as the five-eyed
preserved as flattened fossils, recording the variety of life Opabinia. These animals provide scientists with a spectacular
that had evolved by the start of the Paleozoic Era, about snapshot of life millions of years ago.
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