Charles Doolittle Walcott

Charles Doolittle Walcott was a leading American paleontologist and administrator whose fieldwork in the Canadian Rockies shaped understanding of early animal life. He served as Director of the U.S. Geological Survey and later as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Lake Louise and the 1908 nomenclature. In 1907–1908 Walcott stayed at the Chateau Lake Louise and climbed the surrounding peaks with hammer and hand lens. In his 1908 paper Nomenclature of Some Cambrian Cordilleran Formations, he formally named the stratigraphic layers still used today: the Fairview Formation (oldest quartzites), the Lake Louise Formation (thin grey-green shale where he found the first fossils; brachiopods and trilobite fragments), and the St. Piran Formation (the massive cliff-making quartzite). He linked Richard George McConnell’s structural thrusts to the fossils within them, realising the Gog Group at Lake Louise represented the Early Cambrian; the dawn of complex life. His Lake Louise work led directly to the Burgess Shale discovery in 1909.

Skoki area. Walcott maintained a seasonal field camp near Skoki Mountain; Walcott’s Skoki Mountain Camp; where he and his wife Mary Vaux Walcott (botanist, glacial photographer) conducted fieldwork and photography. He documented the area with panoramic and landscape photographs and field notes; images and captions are preserved in Smithsonian archives. In 1928 he named the Skoki Formation, a Middle Ordovician stratigraphic unit on the western edge of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, with Skoki Mountain as the type locality. The formation is exposed on Fossil Mountain and neighbouring peaks in the Skoki region.

Burgess Shale. In 1909, while working above Emerald Lake near Field in Yoho National Park, Walcott discovered exceptionally preserved Cambrian fossils in what became the Burgess Shale. Mount Stephen; where CPR workers had found “stone bugs” (trilobites) in the 1880s; holds the Mt. Stephen Trilobite Beds, part of the same formation. He opened and excavated the original Walcott Quarry and collected large numbers of specimens that transformed understanding of early animal life. The fossils preserved soft-bodied organisms and soft tissues rarely seen in the fossil record, giving paleontologists an unusually detailed window into Cambrian ecosystems and the Cambrian Explosion. Walcott’s early collecting laid the foundation for later reinterpretation and renewed study of the site, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site (see Burgess Shale).