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June 2013: Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
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Kristoffer
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May 29, 2013 10:18PM
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Despite the odds of becoming fossilized, there are at least 30 sites containing Cambrian fossils. Of these, only a dozen include soft-bodied creatures. One of these 12 sites is the famous Burgess Shale. Stephen Gould quickly points out that this is the most important fossil site in the world. This special group of soft-bodied animals was preserved in great detail. Some scientists are unable to tell the top from the bottom or what end is the head and what end is the tail; to understand this, take a look at Hallucigenia. Our June book is another great selection, but I found that you have to read it at a much slower pace to take in the richness of the author’s writing.Charles Doolittle Walcott, who discovered the Burgess Shale in 1909, did some earlier work in 1892 and named the Ordovician Harding Sandstone. There is a beautiful outcrop of this rock unit near where I live. One of my students found a large cephalopod fossil and a colleague discovered conodonts in the same unit.
The author mentions Henry Fairfield Osborn on page 29 and Osborn’s figure (1.4) depicting brains on page 30. As a side note, Osborn and two other Princeton students organized an expedition to the American West in 1877. This expedition included 18 students. The students organized the trip and financed it. Some were as young as 15. Many were 16. They stopped about three miles from my house and dug up fossil fish they sent on to be described by Edward Drinker Cope. They also dug other fossils and purchased them from a woman homesteader at what is now the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. Osborn went on to become the director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and sent Roy Chapman Andrews to Mongolia to find fossil man but instead found dinosaur eggs. If you go to one of my blog pages I briefly mention the expedition, but I have a picture of the three teen organizers taken in 1877. Osborn holds the long rifle. If you look at the blog page, scroll down just a bit. Here is the URL http://coloradoearthscience.blogspot....
I was looking forward to some discussion about our June book. This is an important part of a group reading the same book. This is a scientific. masterpiece and I am the only one making comments. I hope we could mix it up some on this title before the next.
It is amazing these fossils still give paleontologists a run for their money. Many specimens cannot be classified beyond their phylum. Some genera like Nectocaris, Wiwaxia, Dinomischus are not part of any phylum. The planet was different then too: days were only 21 hours long, a year had 420 days, the continents were joined together without plants or animals ---but the seas held the Burgess fauna! .
Marella, AKA the lace crab, is the most common fossil found at this site. This is also the only place in the world this fossil has ever been found.
Steven wrote: "I was looking forward to some discussion about our June book. This is an important part of a group reading the same book. This is a scientific. masterpiece and I am the only one making comments. I ..."Steven, I agree: discussions are an important part of group reading.
I've just joined this group, so I will need about 4 days to find and read this book.
I'm looking forward to discussing at least a little bit of Wonderful Life before June ends.
Finished this today. This is a book primarily about the abundance of life in that had been preserved in fossils in the Burgess shale.Gould writes about the people who spent hour after painstaking hour examining the samples, deciphering the forms and understanding the compressed fossils in this rock formation. In the second part of the book he writes about Walcott, administrator at the Smithsonian institute until he died, and his error in the analysis in the samples. He then considers the what if questions that evolution throws up, in the final part.
I found the writing style to be quite dry and technical. Understandable to a certain extent given the subject matter, but my feeling is with science writers is that they should make the subject that they are writing about come alive, and this book didn't do it for me. The part on Walcott was good, he was a man who had a lot of influence and authority in the scientific advances in America, but he suffered some fundamental flaws.
This was written 20 or so years ago now, and in its time would have been a seminal work; now it is still important, but understanding of the creatures in the Burgess shale are now better understood and technology can bring them to life in ways that Gould could have never of considered.
I am reading this work as a scientist and as a writer. This week during the day I am attending a writer 's retreat near the Great Lakes. Gould 's vast vocabulary and syntax is that of a master. I noticed his easy and natural use to foreign phrases. He artfully used a number of languages. I thought I would try it and use "ex cathedra" and I could quickly see that my phrase was lost on my group. This work seems to be more than science writing and reminds me more of literature. It is too bad he died so young. We lost a brilliant mind. "de mortuis nil nisi bonum."
