Today at the Design of Life blog: The Smithsonian vs. the Cambrian explosion

_{Denyse O'Leary

February 19, 2008

The Design of Life}

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Charles Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian, had found the equivalent of Noah’s Ark. He found every animal phylum, or – as physicist Gerald Schroeder puts it – the “basic anatomies” of all animal life forms today.

Cause for rejoicing?

No, because there was a problem. The problem was that the find obviously did not support Darwin’s theory of evolution:

So what did he do?

Comments

I recently heard some dispute about the 80 year delay and that some of these fossils were referred to or analyzed over the years. Now I forgot where I saw this but it was in the last month or two. An aside: Did you know that Cambrian means Wales. It was the latin word for what is now Wales and the first stratum for the Cambrian was found in Wales. Similarly some of the other eras refer to regions of Britain under the Romans.jerry_{February 19, 2008
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This is rather old news now. The fauna of the Burgess Shales has been examined extensively for decades now. The issue isn't one of "it doesn't fit with Darwin so we'll ignore it" - the problem was that Walcott assumed that whatever he had found fit into known phyla, whereas we now know (and have known since the 1980's) that the Burgess fauna was far more complex. This extract from the Wikipedia entry on the Burgess Shales says it well: "The significance of the finds was not realised at the time of discovery; the trilobites found dated the fossils to the Middle Cambrian period, and Charles Walcott simply placed the unusual new species within the phyla known to exist during that period, a process Stephen Jay Gould dubbed "shoehorning" in his book about the Burgess Shale, Wonderful Life (1989). A reinvestigation of the fossils in the 1980s by Harry Blackmore Whittington, Derek Briggs, and Simon Conway Morris of the University of Cambridge, however, revealed that the fauna represented were much more diverse and unusual than Walcott had recognized." Nothing unusual there - just another case of a scientist not recognizing the significance of the fossils he had found. And it goes on today as well - only a couple of weeks ago I was reading of a recently published study on a dinosaur fossil found in the 1980s. Often it takes years to undertake a full examination of the fossils, especially when - as in Walcott's case - there were thousands of them. It just goes with the territory.Clarence_{February 19, 2008
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