“Wonderful Life” by Stephen Jay Gould is a documentation of this process, exploring and explaining this new view of evolutionary change through Deep Time.Īlthough Gould was not personally involved in the cataloguing of the Burgess Shale organisms, he was in close communication with the people who were and his clear enthusiasm for the subject shows through. What began as an exercise to catalogue a group of ancient arthropods turned into the discovery of several new phyla of organisms, and ultimately changed the way evolution and selection were viewed. Initially discovered in 1909 by Charles Walcott, the fossils were later examined by three researchers in Cambridge Charles Whittington and two graduate students, Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris. The Burgess Shale is a collection of fossils of soft-bodied invertebrates that was formed soon after the Cambrian Explosion, an apparently rapid appearance of a many groups of complex animals. This is my first attempt at a proper scientific book review, so any feedback would be much obliged.
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