When we got to the top of the mountain, I was unprepared for the impact the fossils would have on me. I had seen many fossils before, of course. But seeing these fossils—marine animals from the dawn of animal life at the top of a mountain with their beautifully preserved appendages and organs—rendered the idea of the “Cambrian explosion” a good deal less theoretical for me than it had been. These complex sea creatures, now brushed by the thin air at an elevation of 7,500 feet in the middle of the Canadian Rockies, had apparently arisen suddenly, almost from nothing by way of ancestral forms,
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No way this was a slow event
