Word: burgesses
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...slices of ink-black shale, are the myriad inhabitants of a vanished world, from plump Aysheaia prancing on caterpillar-like legs to crafty Ottoia, lurking in a burrow and extending its predatory proboscis. Excavated in the early 1900s from a geological formation in the Canadian Rockies known as the Burgess Shale, these relics of the earliest animals to appear on earth are now revered as priceless treasures. Yet for half a century after their discovery, the Burgess Shale fossils attracted little scientific attention as researchers concentrated on creatures that were larger and easier to understand - like the dinosaurs that roamed...
Then, starting in the late 1960s, three paleontologists - Harry Whittington of the University of Cambridge in England and his two students, Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris - embarked on a methodical re-examination of the Burgess Shale fossils. Under bright lights and powerful microscopes, they coaxed fine-grain anatomical detail from the shale's stony secrets: the remains of small but substantial animals that were overtaken by a roaring underwater mudslide 515 million years ago and swept into water so deep and oxygen-free that the bacteria that should have decayed their tissues couldn't survive. Preserved were not just...
...then there was Anomalocaris, a fearsome predator that caught its victims with spiny appendages and crushed them between jaws that closed like the shutter of a camera. "Weird wonders," Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called them in his 1989 book, Wonderful Life, which celebrated the strangeness of the Burgess Shale animals...
...They figured the least amount of attention they'd attract, the longer they'd be able to stay in business,'' says Jeff Burgess, one of the FBI agents who was to conduct regular undercover surveillance of Fulton Avenue. In fact, behind the low-key demeanor, Dink and Drak were suspected of being in the early stages of setting up a ``primary distributorship.'' It would involve cocaine ``muled''--or smuggled--into Birmingham in regular shipments from Los Angeles. There it would be ``cooked'' into crack and finally distributed to local dealers in 1-oz. packets, or possibly even ``eight- balls...
JEFF NOON'S FLUORESCENT AND PHANTASMAGORICAL novel Vurt (Crown; 342 pages; $22) isn't quite the equal of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, with which it is being compared, but in some ways it comes close. It's good enough in its first 50 or 60 pages of atmosphere setting, all smoke machines and flashing strobes, that the reader blinks, shakes his head and wonders whether Noon can sustain the weirdness. The answer, as shapes become familiar in the fog, lies somewhere between "no," "sort of" and "too mad to matter...