Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

office, and never came, while Harry, who could always see essence beneath externality (the key to deciphering the Burgess animals, after all), never insisted on conformity of any kind. Oh, they all engaged in complex cross-fertilization—but as much, I suspect, by reading each other’s papers as by any programmatic or regular discussion. The most I could wrest from any of the trio was an acknowledgement by Derek Briggs that they developed “some corporate perception, even if not by daily interaction.”
    The drama I have to tell is intense and intellectual. It transcends these ephemeral themes of personality and the stock stage. The victory at stake is bigger and far more abstract than any material reward—a new interpretation of life’s history. This goal, once achieved, brings no particular earthly benefit. Paleontology has no Nobel prizes—though I would unhesitatingly award the first to Whittington, Briggs, and Conway Morris as a trio. And, as the old clichés go, you can’t fry an egg with your new view of life, or get on the subway, unless you also have a token. (I don’t think it even gets you any frequent-flyer miles, though almost everything else does.) You do get the gratitude of your fellow paleontologists, and it doesn’t harm your job prospects. But the main reward must be satisfaction—the privilege of working on something exciting, the internal peace of accomplishment, the rare pleasure of knowing that your life made a difference. What more can a person want than to hear, from whatever source he honors as absolute and permanent, the ultimate affirmation that life has been useful: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant”?
    A M ETHODOLOGY OF R ESEARCH
    A common misconception holds that soft-bodied fossils are usually preserved as flat films of carbon on the surface of rocks. The Burgess organisms are, of course, strongly compressed—we cannot expect the preservation of much three-dimensional structure as the weight of water and sediment piles above an entombed body devoid of hard parts. But the Burgess fossils are not always completely flattened—and this discovery provided Whittington with the basis for a method that could reveal their structure. (Burgess soft parts, by the way, are not preserved as carbon. By a chemical process not yet understood, the original carbon was replaced by silicates of alumina and calcium, forming a dark reflective layer. This replacement did not compromise the exquisite preservation of anatomical detail.)
    Walcott never recognized, or appreciated only dimly, that some three-dimensional architecture had been retained. He treated the Burgess fossils as flat sheets, and therefore worked by searching through his specimens for the ones preserved in the most revealing (or least confusing) orientation—usually, for bilaterally symmetrical animals, splayed out straight and flat (as in figure 3.1, a typical Walcott illustration). He ignored specimens in an oblique or frontal orientation, because he thought that the different parts and surfaces so encountered would be squashed together into a single uninterpretable film on the bedding plane; a top view, by contrast, would offer maximal resolution of separate features.
    Walcott illustrated his specimens by photographs, often egregiously retouched. Whittington’s group has also used photography extensively, but mostly for publication, rather than as a primary research tool. The Burgess specimens do not photograph well (figure 3.2 is a magnificent exception), and little can be gained by working from prints, however enlarged or filtered, rather than from actual specimens. The aluminosilicate surfaces reflect light in various ways at different angles of illumination—and some resolution has been gained by comparing the dull images obtained at high angles of illumination with the bright reflections, obtained at low angles.
    Whittington therefore used the oldest method of all as his primary mode of illustration—patient and