Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Read Free

die.
    I have been obsessed with the Burgess Shale for more than a year, and have talked incessantly about its problems with colleagues and students far and wide. Many of their suggestions, and their doubts and cautions, have greatly improved this book. Scientific fraud and general competitive nastiness are hot topics this season. I fear that outsiders are getting a false view of this admittedly serious phenomenon. The reports are so prominent that one might almost envision an act of chicanery for each ordinary event of decency and honor. No, not at all. The tragedy is not the frequency of such acts, but the crushing asymmetry that permits any rare event of unkindness to nullify or overwhelm thousands of collegial gestures, never recorded because we take them for granted. Paleontology is a genial profession. I do not say that we all like each other; we certainly do not agree about very much. But we do tend to be helpful to each other, and to avoid pettiness. This grand tradition has eased the path of this book, through a thousand gestures of kindness that I never recorded because they are the ordinary acts of decent people—that is, thank goodness, most of us most of the time. I rejoice in this sharing, in our joint love for knowledge about the history of our wonderful life.

Wonderful Life

CHAPTER I
The Iconography of an Expectation
    A P ROLOGUE IN P ICTURES
    And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live.—Ezekiel 37:6
    Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day. In February 1942, Knight designed a chronological series of panoramas, depicting the history of life from the advent of multicellular animals to the triumph of Homo sapiens , for the National Geographic . (This is the one issue that’s always saved and therefore always missing when you see a “complete” run of the magazine on sale for two bits an issue on the back shelves of the general store in Bucolia, Maine.) He based his first painting in the series—shown on the jacket of this book—on the animals of the Burgess Shale.
    Without hesitation or ambiguity, and fully mindful of such paleontological wonders as large dinosaurs and African ape-men, I state that the invertebrates of the Burgess Shale, found high in the Canadian Rockies in Yoho National Park, on the eastern border of British Columbia, are the world’s most important animal fossils. Modern multicellular animals make their first uncontested appearance in the fossil record some 570 million years ago—and with a bang, not a protracted crescendo. This “Cambrian explosion” marks the advent (at least into direct evidence) of virtually all major groups of modern animals—and all within the minuscule span, geologically speaking, of a few million years. The Burgess Shale represents a period just after this explosion, a time when the full range of its products inhabited our seas. These Canadian fossils are precious because they preserve in exquisite detail, down to the last filament of a trilobite’s gill, or the components of a last meal in a worm’s gut, the soft anatomy of organisms. Our fossil record is almost exclusively the story of hard parts. But most animals have none, and those that do often reveal very little about their anatomies in their outer coverings (what could you infer about a clam from its shell alone?). Hence, the rare soft-bodied faunas of the fossil record are precious windows into the true range and diversity of ancient life. The Burgess Shale is our only extensive, well-documented window upon that most crucial event in the history of animal life, the first flowering of the Cambrian