 Although in 1931 Percy Raymond opened and briefly excavated another quarry about 20 metres ( 66 ft ) above Walcott 's " Phyllopod bed " , there was very little interest in the Burgess Shale fossils from the 1930s to the early 1960s , and most of those collected by Walcott were stored on high shelving in back rooms at the Smithsonian Institution . Between 1962 and the mid @-@ 1970s Alberto Simonetta re @-@ examined some of Walcott 's collection and suggested some new interpretations . Beginning in the early 1970s Harry Whittington , his associates David Bruton and Christopher Hughes , and his graduate students Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris began a thorough re @-@ examination of Walcott 's collection . Although they assigned groups of fossils to each member of the team , they all decided for themselves which fossils to investigate and in what order . Their publications and Stephen Jay Goulds ' popularization of their work in his book Wonderful Life aroused enduring scientific interest and some public interest in the Cambrian explosion , the apparently rapid appearance of moderately complex bilaterian animals in the Early Cambrian . 
