Welcome to my new website, and thanks for visiting! I will use share information about me and my adventures, news and journal articles, and features about research or work I find particularly interesting. Until then, browse around my CV and Project page to learn more about me.
This photo was taken from the Burgess Shale Walcott Quarry looking down at Emerald Lake in beautiful Yoho National Park, BC in 2016. Here there are fossils from the Cambrian Explosion (541 million years ago!), a period of time where ocean life developed rapidly in many different ways, branching out to represent many of the phyla around today. In the fossil record there are all sorts of strange creatures such as Hallucigenia, a genus of animals so utterly weird-looking scientists felt like they were imagining them when they were first discovered, and Pikaia, a tiny worm that is maybe the oldest known ancestor of vertebrate animals.
The Burgess Shale is a restricted area and can only be accessed by researchers with permits or by the public on special tours that run throughout the summer. I felt so lucky to get to visit this amazing site, walking on rocks and fossils that were on the ocean floor over half a billion years ago. What a priviledge!
- Lucy
