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This book has done probably more than any other to call attention to the animals that lived over 500 million years ago in a shallow sea on the edge of deep water in a region that is now in British Columbia (Canada). Normally only the stony parts of fossils are preserved, but in the Burgess Shale layers there are traces of soft tissues as well. And what a collection of animals they are! Many are so fantastic that I feel that it would be difficult to invent them in a prehistoric fantasy. Stephen J Gould brings these animals to life in a very readable way, with excellent illustrations by Marianne Collins. He does this, all the time referring to those paleontologists who were responsible for discovering and describing them, Charles Doolittle Walcott who found the deposits in the early 1900s, then Harry Whittington and his co-workers Simon Conway Morris & Derek Briggs who re-examined and re-appraised Walcott's specimens as well as carrying out further field work themselves, starting in the 1970s. Gould conveys very well the excitement these workers felt on realising (which Walcott did not) just how fantastic and unique the animals they were studying were. Gould's own interests in the mechanisms of evolution make him an ideal person to present this material and to discuss why it is so important in thinking about how living things have lived and evolved on our planet. Some have said that his comments on Walcott's 'shoehorning' of his discoveries into the same groups of animals alive today, when they clearly do not belong, is too harsh, but this then can be a spur to go on to read Briggs' and Conway Morris' own books. When this book was written little was known about other Cambrian period fossil deposits, in China, Greenland, Australia, with well-preserved soft-bodied fossils. These confirm and extend the discoveries that Gould describes. The Burgess Shale also yields more and more of its secrets; only this year (2012) Conway Morris, Caron and co-workers published (after more than 30 years) what could be the definitive paper on Pikaia, a little beast which may well be the earliest forerunner of the vertebrates, and so of us. So, read, wonder and enjoy life in the Cambrian seas 530 million years ago.Read full review
I have always been interested in fossils and the Burgess Shales fascinate me. I had already bought books on the fossils themselves, but this book is invaluable to anyone trying to understand just why these creatures were as weird as they were. It describes in a very readable manner the incredible story of our interpretation and mis-interpretation of the fossils and presents a completely different version of the theory of evoulution, turning on it's head the trope of from the few to the many and making a sensible and logical pitch for from the many to the few. the book also puts forward the argument that Survival of the fittest might not be as simple as we had thought. Evoulution it argues might have easily taken a completely different route. It was not only the specialist 'niche' animals like 'hallucinogenia' or 'anomalocaris' that became evoulutionary 'dead ends' but also some of the non specialized species that 'should' have survived but didn't. Overall this is anything but a dry treatment of paeleontology, but interesting, thought provoking and a little bit scary. . . .Read full review
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A very interesting and entertaining take on the Cambrian explosion of life but need to be read in conjunction with far more recent publications on this topic.
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Explains a scholarly subject in lay terms.
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