Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is a 1989 book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
I finally opened the packaging of my collection of Cambrian creatures that I had bought some months ago in Tokyo. (They are on exhibit in my kitchen window, so that I can get to know their difficult names).
It turns out we know of these creatures from their discovery in what is now known as the Burgess Shale : a fossil-bearing deposit exposed in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia in Canada.
Earth and its continents looked radically different some 500 million years ago! The Cambrian creatures were the only ones around but appeared in such a short time, that it is called the Cambrian explosion (of animal life). Earth’s surface was some 7 °C warmer than today, and the atmosphere only had 2/3 of today’s levels of oxygen.Here is my collection of Cambrian creatures (http://www.f-favorite.net/). The little models are faithful reproductions from what is known from the fossils. I’m sure some artistic license was taken for the colors of the creatures, though.
