What makes the Burgess Shales in the Canadian Rockies special is that they contain fossilized soft tissues of animals, and how exactly this happened has baffled scientists since the fossils' discovery in 1909. Normally fossilized remains are only of the "hard" parts of animals - the bones, teeth, shells...etc. But at the Burgess Shales, the finer details of the animals are present because their soft tissue is intact.
This soft tissue evidence has allowed scientists to discover and name animals they had no idea ever existed and that bare very little resemblance to anything else they've discovered. They discovered an animal with 5 eyes and a vacuum cleaner-like snout, a crustacean with fins, a worm-like being with pincers and 7 pairs of symmetrical spines, and many other truly fascinating animals.
What the scientists now believe happened is that these animals were covered very quickly by a large slide of mud and pushed so deep in to the ocean that they couldn't undergo the normal processes of decay. So they remain beautifully intact, have given scientists a wealth of information, and given the rest of us one more interesting thing to enjoy about the mountains!
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