Professor Harry Whittington of Cambridge University publishes the first monograph of Burgess’s Shale Bestiary, initiating a comprehensive reexamination that will lead to a revolutionary interpretation not only of Burgess’s fauna but of all life on Earth: the history of life is a story of mass exterminations followed by differentiations within the few surviving lineages, rather than the conventional narrative of steady progress toward ever-greater excellence, complexity, and diversity.
