Marrella Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Marrella is the single most common animal found in the Burgess Shale, with over 25,000 individual specimens collected since the site was discovered in 1909.
• ✓Marrella lived roughly 506 million years ago during the Middle Cambrian, a time when the area that is now British Columbia, Canada was a warm, shallow tropical sea.
• ✓Despite being tiny, only about 2 centimeters long on average, Marrella had an extraordinarily complex headshield bearing two pairs of long backward-sweeping spines that made it look unlike almost any other animal alive today.
• ✓Marrella was so strange when Charles Doolittle Walcott first found it in 1909 that he nicknamed it 'lace crab,' even though it was not a crab at all and belongs to its own unique group of arthropods called marrellomorphs.
• ✓Fossils of Marrella show soft-tissue preservation so detailed that scientists have been able to study its digestive system, its limbs, and even the way it may have moulted its exoskeleton, something almost never preserved in the fossil record.