page_title: Cathedral Formation
hierarchical_section_title: Cathedral Formation
caption_attribution_description: English: Walcott Quarry of the Burgess Shale (Middle Cambrian), British Columbia. The photo shows the Walcott Quarry Shale Member. The white parallel vertical streaks are remnants of drill holes made during excavations in mid-1990s.
context_page_description: The Cathedral Formation is a stratigraphic unit in the southern Canadian Rockies of Alberta and British Columbia, on the western edge of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. It is a thick sequence of carbonate rocks of Middle Cambrian age. It was named for Cathedral Mountain in Yoho National Park by Charles Doolittle Walcott, the discoverer of the Burgess shale fossils.
  The Cathedral Formation includes fossil stromatolites, oncolites, and other algal remains, as well as a few shale beds with trilobites. The Cathedral escarpment on its westernmost edge is thought to have played a major role in the deposition and preservation of the Burgess shale fossils.
context_section_description: The Cathedral Formation is a stratigraphic unit in the southern Canadian Rockies of Alberta and British Columbia, on the western edge of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. It is a thick sequence of carbonate rocks  of Middle Cambrian age. It was named for Cathedral Mountain in Yoho National Park by Charles Doolittle Walcott, the discoverer of the Burgess shale fossils.
  The Cathedral Formation includes fossil stromatolites, oncolites, and other algal remains, as well as a few shale beds with trilobites. The Cathedral escarpment on its westernmost edge is thought to have played a major role in the deposition and preservation of the Burgess shale fossils.
caption: The Cathedral Formation and Cathderal escarpment form the grey mountain in the distance, with the Burgess shale and Walcott Quarry in the foreground.
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