While most of the conference’s 150 participants are paleontologists, geologists or biologists, a handful are interested hobbyists, at least one of whom has an entire basement museum of fossils he has collected over the years. Keynyn Brysse’s talk was fantastic for the more general audience – including myself.

Brysse is not a paleontologist, but a historian of science (she did her BSc in paleontology, and was headed in that direction, but found she couldn’t abide the field work thanks to extreme and persistent sun stroke). She spelled out clearly the different ways in which scientists have been inclined to label the Burgess Shale creatures over the years. From about 1890 to the 1960s is what could be called ‘Phase I’, or, as Stephen J. Gould termed it in his seminal book Wonderful Life, the ‘Shoehorn Phase’. During this time, the creatures seen in the shale were lumped into whatever phylum they were most similar to. Though that may sound sensible, it put many creatures into categories where they clearly did not perfectly fit. In ‘Phase II’, from about 1970 to 1985, such oddball creatures were instead granted their entirely own phyla. Gould called this the ‘Weird Wonders’ phase, and it resulted in a proliferation of more than 20 new categories of life – something, perhaps, of an over-enthusiastic response. Today, Brysse points out, we are in Phase III, or what Gould disparagingly called the ‘Straightening Rod’ phase (as it doesn’t fit with his ideas). In this period, life forms do not necessarily have to fit neatly within a given phylum – they can instead be a ‘stem’ group, branching off from some more familiar ‘crown’ group. This falls into the now-popular form of biological classification called cladistics.

While that may all sound like semantics, Brysse argues that it has a fundamental impact on how scientists think. “The way you classify Burgess Shale animals determines your view of evolution,” she says. An explosion of new phyla, and later a mass extinction of phyla, sounds like a much more major event than an explosion of new species and the dying off of some of those species. They may describe the same events – the same beasts may be born, live and die. But one sounds more extreme than the other, and has implications for whether we think of evolution as a slow or dramatic phenomenon, gradual or step-wise. “Gould has no evidence of a mass extinction; it’s just required by his theory,” she points out. Brysse has just completed her PhD on this topic with the University of Toronto (she jokes that Derek Briggs, one of the critical players in phase III and also at this conference, would often call her the girl who was doing her PhD on his PhD), and intends to turn it into a book. “It would be about what happened after Wonderful Life”, she says. What will it be called? “I don’t know. It’s a shame ‘Wonderful Strife’ has already been taken,” she laments.

Aside from the book, there aren’t many fossils in Brysse’s future – for her post-doc at Princeton, she’s currently studying the history of scientific understanding of the ozone layer.

Posted on behalf of Nicola Jones