The possibilities are endless.
Through the ten years of date tie-ins of the Boidem, I'm almost obsessively sought
out some significant event that merits a moment of recognition in my own rarified
corner of cyberspace. Not that the events that I've highlighted actually benefit
from the fact that I call them to the attention of a handful of readers - they
neither need, nor request, this attention. Still, I've enjoyed finding noteworthy
events - some more noteworthy than others, and some hardly noteworthy at all -
to add an additional hypertextual dimension to these columns.
Due, however, to the fact that it's incredibly difficult for me to move the uploading
date of these columns to either the middle, or the beginning, of the month, the
reservoir of dates into which I can dip my rod to fish out a tie-in has almost
run its course. There are, of course, dates that house more than one noteworthy
event, but more often than not I find myself redefining just what "noteworthy"
means. At least a handful of times it's been a case of inventions that history
passed by, or seemingly insignificant events that in retrospect have gained some
degree of meaning.
I like to think that there's something inherently hypertextual in this sort of
activity. Nodes which may have languished unnoticed still hold the possibility
of new connections, of gaining an unexpected (if fleeting) significance. And that
being the case, this month's date tie-in represents a classic example of precisely
that.
It was on this day, 98 years ago, that Charles Doolittle Walcott discovered (perhaps
that should read "uncovered") the Burgess Shale. The fossils in the
Burgess Shale hardly "waited" millions of years to be uncovered. They
were simply "there", in a fossil bed in the Canadian Rockies. When they
were first examined, researchers reached the logical conclusion that these fossils
were precursors to later-developing fauna, links in a curious, but ultimately
predictable chain. In the 1980s, however, paleontologists determined that their
story was considerably more exciting (it's told wonderfully in Stephen Jay Gould's
Wonderful
Life). They determined that the fossils had (as the
Wikipedia entry tells us):
bizarre anatomical features and only the sketchiest resemblance to other known animals
In his book, Gould claimed that the fossilized fauna found in the shale, fauna
that bore little resemblance to species alive today, suggested that evolution,
rather than plodding along on a predictable straight and narrow path, developed
almost randomly from a wide range of possibilities. And that's similar enough
to hypertext to make the discovery of the shale worth commemorating here.
Go to: The plain brown paper envelope column.