The Cambridge re-description of the Burgess fauna begins

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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.

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