Free Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould Page A

preservation to a local mudslide. Other features of the fossils lead to the same conclusion: very few specimens show signs of decay, implying rapid burial; no tracks, trails, or other marks of organic activity have been found in the Burgess beds, thus indicating that the animals died and were overwhelmed by mud as they reached their final resting place. Since nature usually sneezes on our hopes, let us give thanks for this rare concatenation of circumstances—one that has enabled us to wrest a great secret from a generally uncooperative fossil record.
    WHO, WHEN: THE HISTORY OF DISCOVERY
    Since this book is a chronicle of a great investigation that reversed Walcott’s conventional interpretation of the Burgess fossils, I find it both fitting in the abstract, and beautifully symmetrical in the cause of narrative, that the traditional tale about his discovery is also a venerable legend badly in need of revision.
    We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives (and even of most events that, in retrospect, seem crucial to our fortunes or our history). We therefore retell actual events as stories with moral messages, embodying a few limited themes that narrators through the ages have cultivated for their power to interest and to instruct.
    The canonical story for the Burgess Shale has particular appeal because it moves gracefully from tension to resolution, and enfolds within its basically simple structure two of the greatest themes in conventional narration—serendipity and industry leading to its just reward. * Every paleontologist knows the tale as a staple of campfires and as an anecdote for introductory courses. The traditional version is best conveyed by an obituary for Walcott written by his old friend and former research assistant Charles Schuchert, professor of paleontology at Yale:
    One of the most striking of Walcott’s faunal discoveries came at the end of the field season of 1909, when Mrs. Walcott’s horse slid on going down the trail and turned up a slab that at once attracted her husband’s attention. Here was a great treasure—wholly strange Crustacea of Middle Cambrian time—but where in the mountain was the mother rock from which the slab had come? Snow was even then falling, and the solving of the riddle had to be left to another season, but next year the Walcotts were back again on Mount Wapta, and eventually the slab was traced to a layer of shale—later called the Burgess shale—3000 feet above the town of Field (1928, pp. 283–84).
    Consider the primal character of this tale—the lucky break provided by the slipping horse (figure 2.5), the greatest discovery at the very last minute of a field season (with falling snow and darkness heightening the drama of finality), the anxious wait through a winter of discontent, the triumphant return and careful, methodical tracing of errant block to mother lode. Schuchert doesn’t mention a time for this last act of patient discovery, but most versions claim that Walcott spent a week or more trying to locate the source of the Burgess Shale. His son Sidney, reminiscing sixty years later, wrote (1971, p. 28): “We worked our way up, trying to find the bed of rock from which our original find had been dislodged. A week later and some 750 feet higher we decided that we had found the site.”
    A lovely story, but none of it is true. Walcott, a great conservative administrator (see chapter IV), left a precious gift to historians in his meticulous habits of assiduous record keeping. He never missed a day in his diary, and we can reconstruct the events of 1909 with fair precision. Walcott found the first soft-bodied fossils on Burgess Ridge on either August 30 or 31. His entry for August 30 reads:
    Out collecting on the Stephen formation [the larger unit that includes what Walcott later called the Burgess Shale] all day. Found many interesting fossils on the west slope of the ridge between Mounts Field and Wapta