History of Discovery
Wiwaxia was originally described by G.F. Matthew in 1899, from an isolated spine that had been found earlier in the Ogyopsis Shale, and classified as a hyolithid. Further specimens were found by American paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott in 1911 as a result of one of his field trips to the nearby Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and he classified it as a member of the polychaete group of annelid worms.
In 1966 and 1967 a team led by Harry B. Whittington revisited the Burgess Shale and found so many fossils that it took years to analyze them all, and Wiwaxia was one of the most difficult to analyze. 464 complete specimens of Wiwaxia are known from the Greater Phyllopod bed, where they comprise 0.88% of the community. Eventually in 1985 Simon Conway Morris, then a member of Whittington's team, published a detailed description that concluded Wiwaxia was not a polychaete. All the known specimens came from in and around the Burgess Shale until 1991, when fragmentary fossils were reported from Australia's Georgina Basin. In 2004 additional finds which may represent two different species were reported from the same area.
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