The first major groups of multi-celled animal life on Earth appeared between 600 and 550 million years ago. The fossil record from those times is extremely fragmentary, so these are also some of the most mysterious animals in the fossil record. These books examine some of the oldest multicellular animal life known: the Ediacaran fauna and the bizarre Early to Mid Cambrian faunas like the Burgess Shale.
THE CRUCIBLE OF CREATION: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals
Conway Morris, Simon
c.1998, Oxford Univ. Press
ISBN: 0-19-850256-7
The Burgess Shale is an immensely rich fossil bed located on a mountainside in western Canada. It was originally discovered almost a century ago by Charles Walcott, who interpreted many of the Burgess fossils as aberrant or ancestral forms of known groups of organisms. In the 1970s and 1980s, three British paleontologists re-examined and re-interpreted many of the Burgess Shale fossils. Simon Conway Morris was one of them. This book is his account of that work, and his interpretation of what it tells us about the history and evolution of life on Earth. This covers much of the same ground as Stephen Jay Gould's book WONDERFUL LIFE, but Conway Morris's book is much more up to date because it utilizes data that wasn't available when Gould wrote his book.
THE FOSSILS OF THE BURGESS SHALE
Briggs, Erwin, Collier
c.1994, Smithsonian Institute
ISBN: 1-56098-364-7
This is a formal look at the nature and taxonomy of many Burgess Shale organisms. For each fossil, there's one or more photographs, a description, and a classification. The classification is firm in some cases and tentative in others, and the text is pretty clear as to which is which. There's little speculation on what the living organisms looked like or how they lived. The photographs are excellent and what text there is is very high quality, so it's a good book.
THE GARDEN OF EDIACARA
McMenamin, Mark
c.1998, Columbia Univ.
ISBN: 0-231-10558-4
A look at the bizarre Precambrian fossils called the Ediacara fauna. The Ediacaran organisms are the first known major fossil fauna, dating from just before the start of the Cambrian Period. However, many of the Ediacarans are extremely strange organisms that show little resemblance to any later ones, either plant or animal.
WONDERFUL LIFE
Gould, Stephen Jay
c.1989, W. W. Norton
ISBN:
This book brought the Burgess Shale out of obscurity. It's Gould's look at the Burgess Shale, and the 1970s-1980s re-evaluation of the Burgess fossils that showed just how strange many of them are. This is Gould at his best, a well-written and well-reasoned examination of a great puzzle of science and its solution. Unfortunately, it also shows some of Gould's flaws, as he tends to force interpretations onto the fossils and sometimes speculates a bit too freely. Still a very good read, and well worth having.
I also have one book that goes into even older fossils: the microfossils that are all that's left of Earth's first life, long before multicelled animals appeared.
CRADLE OF LIFE: The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils
Schopf, J. William
c.1999, Princeton Univ. Press
ISBN: 0-691-00230-4
A personal look at the recent discoveries of Precambrian fossils, plus a lot of material on simple cell biology and some excellent photos of Precambrian fossils. Schopf is unfortunately not a very dynamic writer, so the book isn't as interesting as it could be. But it's still quite good, and a very interesting and useful reference.
