The Yoho National Park is situated high in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Yoho is the Cree word for 'awe' and it is truly an awe inspiring place: majestic peaks, lakes of emerald and blue, vast glaciers and dark, silent forests.
In the middle of the park is a protected area – The Burgess Shale – where fossils from the Cambrian period have been preserved in exquisite detail. The Burgess Shale is a useful place to gain a sense of perspective. The fossils were laid down 530 million years ago during a period when life on earth exploded in number, diversity and complexity. What is almost unique about this fossil find is that the soft parts of the creatures have been preserved. Consequently, a whole ecosystem of sea dwelling organisms has been preserved. Rejoicing in names like Opabinia (a five eyed animal which is unlike anything alive today) this community of creatures spoke to me of how evolution has changed the way we, as human beings, think about ourselves.
Until evolution, we imagined the earth to be young and ourselves to be its created centre piece.
The Burgess Shale, speaking as it does of the Theory of Evolution, changes that perspective. To understand why, it is useful to employ the well recognised device of conceptualising the 4.5 billion years of the world's history as a single calendar year. The organisms from the Burgess Shale did not appear till the autumn and the dinosaurs came for Christmas (that's worth emphasising – in this perspective, the dinosaur era is late December). All of human history is crammed into a few moments before midnight on New Year's Eve.
Standing high on the mountain side looking down the valley to Emerald Lake it is hard to internalise the reality that these rocks were initially the soft mud of a tropical ocean floor. Tectonic plates move the earth's continents very slowly (at the speed with which a human nail grows). Yet, enough time has passed to move and fold the earth's plates such that what was once a tropical ocean floor is now a glacial mountain side.
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