Folktales have long held that the greatest mountains hold the oldest secrets, that their roots can dig back deep into memory and their caverns will play home to ancient dragons. Within the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia lies Mount Burgess, home not to dragons, but dinosaurs and other strange creatures in a world you can explore online through a new virtual exhibit from the Royal Ontario Museum.

 

The creatures range in nature from being squid-like things with black eyes and just two tentacles to spiny, many-legged things that scurry about with bull-like horns. They’ve been captured in time as fossils along a ridge known as the Burgess Shale. It’s considered one of the world’s richest deposits for fossils and has been a source of constant discovery to scientists for the past one hundred and twenty-five years.

The ROM has used digital 3D models and animations to bring more than two hundred of these creatures to life in their authoritative gallery, which also recreates the area as it used to exist under the sea, more than 500 million years ago.

Their Sea Odyssey offers a digital submarine ride into that underwater past while a collection of high resolution panoramas and a Fly In video allow you to zoom into the same area today, as the mountainous YoHo Park and World Heritage Site.

The Burgess Shale Online Exhibition is part of the Canadian Virtual Museum and a collaboration between Parks Canada and the ROM, who continue to conduct field expeditions into the Burgess Shale for research.