In The Blink Of An Eye by Andrew Parker

were chiefly responsible for the environmental findings of the Burgess project, and in 1966 Whittington moved from Harvard to Cambridge University, where much of the major work on the redescription of specimens and ecological
aspects of the Burgess ecosystem was carried out. In 1972, Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris became involved in the Cambridge project. Originally students of Whittington, Briggs and Conway Morris played major roles in painting a reliable picture of the Burgess ecosystem - the community structure as a whole. This became the earliest ecosystem where the workings are understood in detail. It is one thing to know of an extensive collection of fossils from one particular site, but quite another to understand the ecological workings of the original environment. Because the Burgess environment was, in geological terms, very near to the time of the Cambrian explosion, it had great potential to interest much wider scientific circles. The stage was now set for the next phase of work on the Burgess Shale, which later transpired to be as important as the original scientific investigations.
    Work on the Burgess Shale fossils led to the first major understanding of the Cambrian explosion within the community of Cambrian biologists, but for the obscure Burgess animals to attract the attention of a wider audience, and compete in the dinosaur arena, some particularly imaginative and skilful writing was necessary. This first came in the form of Stephen Jay Gould’s award-winning book Wonderful Life , published in 1989. In his book, Gould succeeded in showing the world that animals once existed on Earth that were far more bizarre than our wildest conceptions of alien life-forms. Wonderful Life captured unexpected levels of attention, partly attributed to an ingenious explanation of how we ourselves are involved in the Cambrian explosion. Gould’s curtain came down on Pikaia , a swimming worm that was the first known member (at that time) of the phylum to which we belong. If Pikaia had not survived the Cambrian period, the story goes, then we would not be here today.
    Today it is generally believed that ten phyla are represented by the Burgess fauna: sponges, cnidarians (here sea pens and sea anemones), comb jellies, lamp shells, molluscs, hyoliths, priapulid worms, ‘bristle worms’ (there are also other worms in this phylum), velvet worms, arthropods, echinoderms (here including sea lilies and sea cucumbers) and chordates (to which we belong). Algae and cyanobacteria are also represented in the Burgess Shale biota, along with one or two animals that
remain a mystery and have yet to be assigned to a phylum, although this does not necessarily imply that they belong to additional, extinct phyla.

Palaeontological gold
    Although the Burgess Shale fauna dominated discussions on Cambrian evolution for many years, other Cambrian assemblages have been more recently discovered. The limestone shale of southern Sweden contains late Cambrian material in stones known as ‘Orsten’. This material shows mixed preservation, and includes some complete and exquisitely preserved tiny arthropods such as trilobites and ‘seed-shrimps’ or their relatives. The Orsten fossils show a type of preservation, called phosphatisation, which is also known from early Cambrian deposits of Comley in Shropshire, England.
    The Canadian palaeontologist Nick Butterfield, now at Cambridge University, found Cambrian fossils in borehole samples from Mount Cap, near the Great Bear Lake in north-west Canada. Here, 525-million-year-old animals have been exceptionally well-preserved with fully resolvable structures as narrow as 100 nanometres, or one ten-thousandth of a millimetre (less than the wavelength of light). Among the fauna known from Mount Cap is a species of Wiwaxia . Wiwaxia was a primitive form of bristle worm where the ‘bristles’ were modified to become protective spines and scales. Its body was short and fat