A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [161]
And so matters seemed destined to remain forever until one day in 1909, three months shy of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, when a paleontologist named Charles Doolittle Walcott made an extraordinary find in the Canadian Rockies.
Walcott was born in 1850 and grew up near Utica, New York, in a family of modest means, which became more modest still with the sudden death of his father when Walcott was an infant. As a boy Walcott discovered that he had a knack for finding fossils, particularly trilobites, and built up a collection of sufficient distinction that it was bought by Louis Agassiz for his museum at Harvard for a small fortune—about $70,000 in today's money. Although he had barely a high school education and was self taught in the sciences, Walcott became a leading authority on trilobites and was the first person to establish that trilobites were arthropods, the group that includes modern insects and crustaceans.
In 1879 he took a job as a field researcher with the newly formed United States Geological Survey and served with such distinction that within fifteen years he had risen to be its head. In 1907 he was appointed secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, where he remained until his death in 1927. Despite his administrative obligations, he continued to do fieldwork and to write prolifically. “His books fill a library shelf,” according to Fortey. Not incidentally, he was also a founding director of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which eventually became the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, or NASA, and thus can rightly be considered the grandfather of the space age.
But what he is remembered for now is an astute but lucky find in British Columbia, high above the little town of Field, in the late summer of 1909. The customary version of the story is that Walcott, accompanied by his wife, was riding on horseback on a mountain trail beneath the spot called the Burgess Ridge when his wife's horse slipped on loose stones. Dismounting to assist her, Walcott discovered that the horse had turned a slab of shale that contained fossil crustaceans of an especially ancient and unusual type. Snow was falling—winter comes early to the Canadian Rockies—so they didn't linger, but the next year at the first opportunity Walcott returned to the spot. Tracing the presumed route of the rocks' slide, he climbed 750 feet to near the mountain's summit. There, 8,000 feet above sea level, he found a shale outcrop, about the length of a city block, containing an unrivaled array of fossils from soon after the moment when complex life burst forth in dazzling profusion—the famous Cambrian explosion. Walcott had found, in effect, the holy grail of paleontology. The outcrop became known as the Burgess Shale, and for a long time it provided “our sole vista upon the inception of modern life in all its fullness,” as the late Stephen Jay Gould recorded in his popular book Wonderful Life.
Gould, ever scrupulous, discovered from reading Walcott's diaries that the story of the Burgess Shale's discovery appears to have been somewhat embroidered—Walcott makes no mention of a slipping horse or falling snow—but there is no disputing that it was an extraordinary find.
It is almost impossible for us whose time on Earth is limited to a breezy few decades to appreciate how remote in time from us the Cambrian outburst was. If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of