Pikaia gracilens is an extinct, primitive chordate animal known from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia. Described in 1911 by Charles Doolittle Walcott as an annelid, and in 1979 by Harry B. Whittington and Simon Conway Morris as a chordate, it became "one of the most famous early chordate fossils," or "famously known as the earliest described Cambrian chordate". It is estimated to have lived during the latter period of the Cambrian explosion.