by Stephen Jay Gould
This was an impulse buy because I had heard so many wonderful things about this book. But...well... I found it rather disappointing.There are ridiculous amount of irrelevant waffling and personal commentary at the beginning and end of the book that makes the reading experience a bore. The book get...
This is a book primarily about the abundance of life in that had been preserved in fossils in the Burgess shale.Gould writes about the people who spent hour after painstaking hour examining the samples, deciphering the forms and understanding the compressed fossils in this rock formation. In the sec...
Reading PlanDay 1: Chapter 1 p. 23-49Day 2: Chapter 2 p. 53-106 Day 3: Chapter 3 p. 107-293 Day 4: Chapter 4 p. 240-291 Day 5: Chapter 5 p. 292-324
Gould's best. About the Cambrian explosion. Natural selection served up all kinds of possible life forms whose fossils have been found in the Burgess Shale. However, most of these possibilities were unsuccessful. The big winner was a tiny little creature with a, wait for it, spinal chord. So cool!! ...
Stephen Jay Gould performs a really unlikely feat in this book; he makes arthropods as fascinating as dinosaurs! In fact he makes a subject that could be extra-ordinarily dull - the process of taxonomic classification of a bunch of extra-old fossils of small, squidgy animals - into a dramatic and gr...
Stephen Jay Gould performs a really unlikely feat in this book; he makes arthropods as fascinating as dinosaurs! In fact he makes a subject that could be extraordinarily dull - the process of taxonomic classification of a bunch of super-old fossils of small, squidgy animals - into a dramatic and gri...
The Burgess Shale is a fossil deposit of importance equal to that of the Rift Valley sites of East Africa in that it provides truly pivotal evidence for the story of' life on earth. The shale comes from a small quarry in the Canadian Rockies discovered in the early 20th century by Charles Walcott, t...
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History makes a compelling case for contingency as a major factor in the history of evolution. It does this through the story of Cambrian animals from the Burgess Shale. This book made learning about the Burgess Shale and all its quirky creatures f...
Log in with Facebook 
