May 15, 2002. Ammonite Resources is honored to announce
that its Managing Partner G. Warfield "Skip" Hobbs has been elected
to the board of directors of the Yoho-Burgess Shale Foundation, Field, British Columbia.
The not-for-profit Yoho-Burgess Shale Foundation was established in 1993. It
serves as the "guardian" of the would famous Burgess Shale fossil
site in the Canadian Rockies Yoho National Park. The YBSF offers
guided tours to the fossil localities; organizes geological, paleontological,
and earth science short courses and seminars, and geoscience teacher training
programs; and publishes a quarterly newsletter called "Marrella". The
foundation's website can be found at www.burgess-shale.bc.ca.
The 525 million year old Cambrian Age Burgess Shale
hosts one of the earth's oldest, most unique and bizarre assemblages of fossil
arthropods, annelids, and even the first chordate. Among the factors that
make the fossil site so special is the exquisite preservation of the soft body
parts of the creatures. Many of the organisms- like the five-eyed Opabinia with
an elephant-like proboscis, are unique phyla with no known ancient or modern
descendants. Discovered in 1909 by the then Director of the Smithsonian
Institution, Dr. Charles Doolittle Walcott, the Burgess Shale fossil locality
was declared a World heritage Site by UNESCO in 1981. Stephen Jay Gould,
Harvard University's late Professor of Paleontology wrote a fascinating book in
1989 about the Burgess Shale titled "Wonderful Life". Dr. Gould
called the Burgess Shale "one of the world's most significant fossil
discoveries".
Mr. Hobbs's election to the Yoho-Burgess Shale Foundation board, follows his appointment in January as the representative of the 31,000 member American Association of Petroleum Geologists to the Advisory Board of the American Geological Institute in Washington, D.C. The AGI is the "umbrella "organization that represents 40 geoscience societies with over 120,000 professional earth scientists, ranging from hydrologists and soil scientists, to geoscience teachers, to mining and petroleum geologists.