20 Dollars - Elizabeth II Marrella

The Marrella splendens — the subject of this coin — is among the most abundant organisms recovered from the Burgess Shale deposit in British Columbia, first excavated by Charles Doolittle Walcott in 1909. Despite its numbers, it took decades before paleontologists fully understood its place in the arthropod family tree. This issue is part of the Royal Canadian Mint's ongoing Fossils of Canada series, which leaned heavily on the Burgess Shale finds given Canada's singular claim to that Cambrian-period deposit, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.