Harry Whittington (1916–2010) Thousands Collected by the Geological Survey Palaeontologist Who Revealed the Extraordinary Animals of the Burgess Shale

NEWS & VIEWS NATURE|Vol 466|5 August 2010

OBITUARY first target was Marrella, the most common arthropod in the fauna. Whittington selected the most informative specimens from among Harry Whittington (1916–2010) thousands collected by the Geological Survey Palaeontologist who revealed the extraordinary animals of the Burgess shale. of Canada and previously by Walcott. He and his team achieved remarkable results in their studies of Burgess Shale fossils .

Harry B. Whittington, who died on 20 June by the painstaking application of traditional IV aged 94, led research on the fossils of the methods: a modified dental drill for removing Un Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada. the matrix that concealed parts of specimens, His team’s studies of these fossils, which date a camera lucida attached to a binocular ARVARD , H , to about 505 million years ago, revolutionized microscope for preparing drawings, and IBRARY

our understanding of the ‘Cambrian various photographic techniques, including L

Explosion’, the origin of all the major animal the use of ultraviolet light. Examining AYR M body plans. Whittington was also the world’s specimens preserved in different attitudes T leading authority on trilobites, diverse helped in restoring the three-dimensional ns eR , Y marine arthropods of Palaeozoic age — the appearance of these flattened fossils. g era between 542 million and 251 million Whittington expected his students to work OOLO Z

years ago — that fascinate professionals and independently, but he was supportive, tolerant, e collectors alike. Whittington continued to kind and generous — an avuncular figure to publish on them into his nineties. many of them, including myself.

Whittington grew up in Birmingham, UK, The Burgess Shale provides a much more OMPARATIV C OF and developed a lifelong interest in Lower complete picture of Cambrian life than

Palaeozoic rocks and fossils as a PhD student the fossil record of shells alone. Although UM se at Birmingham University. He mapped Walcott identified the Burgess Shale animals U the geology of the Berwyn Hills in north as early examples of modern groups, M es Wales, determining the age of the rocks Whittington found it difficult to place some RCHIV using brachiopods and trilobites. In 1938, of the more unusual forms, such as Opabinia A a Commonwealth Fellowship took him to authority on trilobites. In addition to and Anomalocaris, in living taxa. When he the Peabody Museum at Yale University in monographs on faunas from Virginia, presented his preliminary restoration of New Haven, Connecticut, where he focused Newfoundland and north Wales, he studied Opabinia — with its anterior proboscis, five on trilobites, including blind forms called the development of trilobites from larva to eyes, flap-like appendages and rudder-like trinucleids, which are characteristic of rocks of adult using silicified specimens. In those tail — at a conference in 1972, the audience Ordovician age (dating to about 488 million to days — before the advent of scanning laughed. Such a reaction is unthinkable 444 million years ago). Whittington became electron microscopy — he had to develop today: we have become used to the oddities enthralled by the extra morphological detail photographic techniques to illustrate tiny thrown up by the Cambrian radiation, and afforded by trilobites that have been replaced specimens, sometimes less than 1 millimetre now know that Opabinia is an early offshoot by silica during fossilization. Silicified in dimension. Whittington made major of the line leading to the modern arthropods. specimens do not have to be dug out of contributions on the morphology, biology More recently, exceptionally well preserved the rock; they can be isolated by dissolving and evolution of trilobites, including some of Cambrian animals have turned up in other limestone in acid — leaving the fossils intact. the earliest identifications of ancient faunal parts of the world, notably at Chengjiang Whittington married an American — provinces on the basis of trilobite distributions in China and Sirius Passet in Greenland. Dorothy Arnold, who would be his constant and the former positions of tectonic plates. But it was the Burgess Shale that pushed the companion for more than 50 years — before Whittington’s research shifted dramatically creatures of the Cambrian into the limelight. he left Yale in 1940 and took up a lectureship in 1966, when he was invited to head a Ironically, it was not Whittington’s 1985 in Rangoon. The ensuing invasion of the Geological Survey of Canada investigation book The Burgess Shale that generated the Japanese army prompted a remarkable journey of the Burgess Shale, including fieldwork excitement (Whittington was a remarkably out of Burma (now Myanmar) to China, in the Rockies. The Burgess Shale had modest individual), but Stephen Jay Gould’s where Whittington taught at Ginling Women’s been discovered by Charles Walcott of the 1989 laudatory best-seller Wonderful College in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, until Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC Life. Gould dubbed some of the more the Second World War ended in Europe. in the decade before Whittington was born. unusual Burgess Shale creatures “weird He returned to Birmingham as a lecturer The deposit is unusual in preserving a wonders”. However, it was Whittington in 1945. So began further fieldwork in north remarkable diversity of soft-bodied creatures, who had discovered the ‘weirdness’. His Wales on the stratigraphy and fossils of the which are normally lost to decay. After major contribution was in confirming the classic Ordovician rocks around Bala. But Walcott’s preliminary descriptions, the fauna explosive nature of the Cambrian radiation Whittington continued to be fascinated was largely ignored, until the Canadian and establishing a platform for interpreting by silicified trilobites and the remarkable Survey set out to study the geology of the the early evolution of the major invertebrate complexities of the trilobite skeleton that region and to make a new — Canadian — groups — now a central concern of they reveal. In 1947, he spent three months collection from the nation’s most famous biologists who are delving into evolutionary in Washington DC studying examples from fossil locality (not least because Walcott’s development and gene sequences to resolve the Ordovician rocks of Virginia, and in 1949 enormous collection is at the Smithsonian). the tree of life. seized the chance to work in the United States As he started the Burgess Shale project, Derek E. G. Briggs when he was offered a post at the Museum Whittington moved from Cambridge, Derek E. G. Briggs is in the Department of Geology of Comparative Zoology at Harvard in Massachusetts, to the University of and Geophysics, and the Peabody Museum of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge, UK. Arthropods were the most Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, During Whittington’s 17 years at Harvard, diverse group of animals in the Cambrian, as Connecticut 06520, USA. he became established as the international they are today, and it was no surprise that his e-mail: [email protected]