Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould
Wonderful Life is pretty, well, wonderful. If your curiosity about the Burgess Shale or the weird and wonderful beings of the Cambrian period needs sating, this book should more than do it. It is quite dense — Gould may have been a popular science writer, but he didn’t dumb it down — but it’s worth the time investment.
It’s true that some of the reconstructions of these beings have been challenged since Gould wrote, but it’s still worth reading for his overall theory about the development of life, and much important (and correct) detail about the Burgess Shale.
This book is fab! Got me really excited about paeolontology for the first time in many years. I wasn’t aware that there was some dissent regarding some of the interpretations of fossils but I shouldn’t really be surprised, especially in cases where there was only one example known. Have more turned up, do you know?
I think in some cases the — I’ve forgotten the word, argh, the other half of the fossil has been re-examined.
Do you mean the cast and mold?
I think they call it part and counterpart. I might be thinking of something else, though… I’ve read quite a bit of palaeontology lately.
Where-as palaeontology is in my far distant past…maybe I’m becoming a fossil?
Burgess Shale sounds like a film actor from the black and white days — wasn’t there an actor actually called Burgess Meredith?
Ha! I believe so!