The Cambridge re-description of the Burgess fauna begins

Assembled from 19 blocks · 1 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. Harry Whittington, with his research students Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris, began a systematic re-examination of Walcott's Burgess Shale material using a technique Walcott had not applied: dissecting the flattened specimens with a needle under a microscope to reveal structures lying beneath the exposed surface, and reconstructing three-dimensional anatomy from specimens compressed at different angles. Animal after animal came apart from Walcott's classifications. Opabinia proved to have five eyes and a frontal grasping proboscis; Hallucigenia was initially reconstructed upside down and back to front; Anomalocaris turned out to be three previously described "animals" that were parts of one. The re-description is the reason the Burgess Shale became an argument about the shape of animal evolution rather than a rich but unsurprising fauna.
3. Knowledge
4. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
5. Anomalocaris
6. The Cambridge re-description of the Burgess fauna begins
7. Connections
8. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
9. Anomalocaris
10. The Cambrian explosion
11. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
12. The Cambrian explosion
13. Walcott locates the Burgess Shale beds
14. The Cambridge re-description of the Burgess fauna begins
15. The Cambrian explosion
16. The Cambrian explosion
17. The Cambridge re-description of the Burgess fauna begins
18. Evidence
19. Supports the narrative of Walcott's discovery and classification, the Whittington–Briggs–Conway Morris re-description, and the reassembly of Anomalocaris from three separately named fossils. Gould's own thesis about disparity and contingency is a contested interpretation and is not asserted as fact in this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked.