万物简史 第468期:生命在前进(10)（在线收听） |
With his supervisor, Harry Whittington, and fellow graduate student Derek Briggs, Conway Morris spent the next several years making a systematic revision of the entire collection, and cranking out one exciting monograph after another as discovery piled upon discovery. Many of the creatures employed body plans that were not simply unlike anything seen before or since, but were bizarrely different. One, Opabinia, had five eyes and a nozzle-like snout with claws on the end. Another, a disc-shaped being called Peytoia, looked almost comically like a pineapple slice. A third had evidently tottered about on rows of stilt-like legs, and was so odd that they named it Hallucigenia. There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, "Oh fuck, not another phylum." 在随后的几年里，康韦·莫里斯与他的导师哈里，惠廷顿和同学德里克·布里格斯一起，对全部收藏品重新进行了系统的分类。他们注意到一个又一个新的发现，发出一阵又一阵惊叹声。许多生物的横剖面是以前和之后完全没有见过的，简直是奇形怪状的。比如，Opabinia长着五只眼睛和一个鼻子似的喙，末端还有爪子。又如，有个名叫Peytoia的家伙呈盘形，样子滑稽得像一片环形的菠萝。再如，有一个显然曾经用一排排高跷似的腿走过路，样子如此古怪，他们把它命名为致幻虫。这些收藏品中有许许多多不曾认识的新东西，以至于有一次打开另一个抽屉的时候，有人听见莫里斯竟然在说：“哦，真该死，这里面没有一个新的门呀！”
The English team's revisions showed that the Cambrian had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. Name a creature, from a nematode worm to Cameron Diaz, and they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party.
这个英国小组的重新分类表明，寒武纪在动物体形方面是个无与伦比的创新和实验的时代。在差不多40亿年的时间里，生命一直是慢腾腾的，看不出有任何朝着复杂方向前进的雄心壮志；接着，在仅仅500万一l000万年的一段时间里，它创造了所有今天在用的基本体形。你可以点出任何一种动物，从线虫到卡梅伦·迪亚斯，它们使用的都是在寒武纪派对上首创的架构。 |
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