Some discoveries are so unusual it takes years, decades and sometimes centuries to understand their full significance. One such discovery is the fossil bed known as the Burgess Shale, which contains a record of bizarre creatures that lived 505m years ago. It was discovered in the Canadian Rockies over a century ago and was popularised in 1989 in a book, "Wonderful Life", by Stephen Jay Gould, an American palaeontologist. It has long been believed that the curious fauna that lived there vanished in a series of extinctions because the fossil record ends. But that no longer appears to be the case.
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机译：有些发现是如此不寻常，需要数年，数十年甚至数个世纪的时间才能理解其全部意义。这样的发现之一就是称为伯吉斯页岩的化石床，其中记录了生活在5.05亿年前的奇异生物。它是在一个世纪以前的加拿大落基山脉中发现的，并于1989年由美国古生物学家史蒂芬·杰伊·古尔德（Stephen Jay Gould）所著的《精彩人生》一书中得到推广。长期以来人们一直认为，由于化石记录的结束，在那里生活的好奇的动物群在一系列的灭绝中消失了。但这似乎不再是事实了。
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