Workshops
Canada’s Fossil Heritage- Celebrating 50 Years of Burgess Shale Research

Name: Canada’s Fossil Heritage- Celebrating 50 Years of Burgess Shale Research
Start: 2025-10-04T13:00:00-0400
End: 2025-10-04T16:00:00-0400
Location: Royal Ontario Museum

Date

Saturday, Oct 4, 2025 13:00

Registration Opens

Monday, Aug 11, 2025 00:00

Location

Level 1,

Weston Entrance Queen's Park

Admission

Workshops - Public: $90.00 Workshops - Member: $82.00

Date

Saturday, Oct 4, 2025 13:00

Registration Opens

Monday, Aug 11, 2025 00:00

Location

Level 1,

Weston Entrance Queen's Park

Admission

Workshops - Public: $90.00 Workshops - Member: $82.00

Take a special behind the scenes look at some of the weird and wonderful Burgess Shale animals collected by ROM over the past 50 years. Participants will visit the Willner Madge Dawn of Life Gallery, interact with a special video retrospective of the Museum’s Burgess Shale expeditions, and delve into the variety and evolutionary significance of animal forms represented on display. In this workshop, designed exclusively to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Burgess Shale fossil [ER1] [2] discoveries, participants are invited into the world of fossil research through examining real fossils from the collections at ROM, and join in discussions about current Burgess Shale research.

Instructors

William Scott

William Scott is a ROM-affiliated PhD student the University of Toronto who studies the evolution, biostratigraphy, and morphology of trilobites from the Burgess Shale. William has a BSc and MSc in Earth Science from Laurentian University, where he researched the biostratigraphy of early and middle Cambrian trilobites from the Mackenzie Mountains. On top of his work on Cambrian trilobites, William also has two decades of experience collecting Paleozoic fossils from all over southern Ontario and has participated in Paleozoic bedrock mapping projects in southeastern Ontario.

Hugo Li

Hugo Li is a master’s student at the invertebrate paleontology lab at the ROM. He is currently studying Burgess Shale radiodonts, which encompass many Cambrian predators. Hugo is in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. As such, he is interested in: (1) evolutionary relationships between radiodonts (stem arthropods) and modern arthropods; (2) evolutionary relationships within radiodonts. In addition, he is also working on understanding the roles different radiodonts played in the Cambrian food web.