Data from: Paleocommunity analysis of the Burgess Shale Tulip Beds, Mount Stephen, British Columbia: comparison with the Walcott Quarry and implications for community variation in the Burgess Shale

The Tulip Beds locality on Mount Stephen (Yoho National Park, British
Columbia) yields one of the most abundant and diverse (~10,000 specimens
in 110 taxa) Burgess Shale fossil assemblages in the Canadian Rockies.
Detailed semi quantitative and quantitative analyses of this assemblage
suggest strong similarities with the Walcott Quarry on Fossil Ridge. Both
assemblages are dominated by epibenthic, sessile, and suspension feeding
taxa, mostly represented by arthropods and sponges and have comparable
diversity patterns, despite sharing only about half the genera. However,
the Tulip Beds has a higher relative abundance of suspension feeders and
taxa of unknown affinity compared to the Walcott Quarry. These biotic
variations are probably largely attributable to ecological and
evolutionary differences between the two temporally distinct communities
that adapted to similar, but not identical, environmental settings. For
instance, the Tulip Beds is farther away from the Cathedral Escarpment
than the Walcott Quarry. The Tulip Beds and Walcott Quarry assemblages are
more similar to each other than either one is to the assemblages of the
Chengjiang biota, although the relative diversity of major taxonomic
groups and ecological patterns are similar in all assemblages. The
conserved diversity patterns and ecological structures among sites suggest
that the ecological composition of Cambrian Burgess Shale-type communities
was relatively stable across wide geographic and temporal scales.