Page 160 - The Cambrian Evidence that Darwin Failed to Comprehend
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The Cambrian Evidence That Darwin Failed to Comprehend
cean which must have lived long before the {Cambrian},” he wrote,
thirteen years before Thomas Hardy confronted his hero with anoth-
er such “primitive crustacean.” The attribution of trilobites to the
arthropods may be almost instinctive. The anthropologist Kenneth
Oakley made known a perforated specimen, a pendant probably, re-
covered from the Grotte du Trilobite in Yonne (France). This is a late
Paleolithic cave . . . In the same cave there was found a beautiful carv-
ing of a beetle. “It does seem reasonable,” says Oakley in 1965, “to in-
fer that the trilobite would have appeared to the untutored yet obser-
vant and thoughtful Magdalenian as a kind of insect in stone. Quite
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