Quotes from book
Wonderful Life

Stephen Jay Gould Original title ワンダフル・ライフ : バージェス頁岩と生物進化の物語 (Japanese, 1990)

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. The volume made The New York Times Best Seller list, was the 1991 winner of the Royal Society's Rhone-Poulenc Prize, the American Historical Association's Forkosch Award, and was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Gould described his later book Full House as a companion volume to Wonderful Life.


“The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.”

Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.
Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 65

“The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality.”

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), Preface

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