Visions of the Pyrocene

Abstract

In the summer of 2016, I was standing along the banks of Vermillion River in the Canadian Rockies not far from the Burgess Shale, which is home to the fossilized impressions of weird and wonderful creatures that lived half a billion years ago. Paleontologist Charles Walcott discovered this site in 1909, but it was Harvard scientist Stephen J. Gould who made these fossils famous in his 1989 book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. In that narrative on the quirks of evolution, Gould argued that as fit as these soft and hard-bodied animals might have been, fitness did not ensure their survival in a world that was rapidly cooling at the end of the so-called Cambrian explosion.