![]() ![]() ![]() The adoption of cladistics, and its corollary, the stem group concept, has forged a new understanding of the Burgess Shale. This third phase represents a revolutionary new understanding, brought about, I believe, by a change in taxonomic methodology that led to a new perception of the Burgess creatures, and a new way to comprehend their relationships with modern organisms. ![]() Title: Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale. His titles include Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, The Structure. More recently, a third phase of Burgess Shale studies has arisen, which has not yet been historically examined. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history. Gould contrasted the initial interpretation of these fossils, in which they were 'shoehorned' into modern groups, with the first major reexamination begun in the 1960s, when the creatures were perceived as 'weird wonders', possessing unique body plans and unrelated to modern organisms. The variety of strange forms in the Burgess Shale, Gould argued in his book Wonderful Life, represent a host of experiments in animal design. The Burgess Shale, a set of fossil beds containing the exquisitely preserved remains of marine invertebrate organisms from shortly after the Cambrian explosion, was discovered in 1909, and first brought to widespread popular attention by Stephen Jay Gould in his 1989 bestseller Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history. Stephen Jay Gould considered the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian Explosion as an illustration of the importance of chance and contingency in history and evolution. ![]()
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