Death and Legacy
After Walcott's death in Washington, DC, his samples, photographs, and notes remained in storage until their rediscovery by a new generation of paleontologists in the late 1960s. Since then, many of his interpretations have been revised.
Walcott would be little known today if he had not been brought to attention by Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life (1989). In this book, Gould put forth his opinion that Walcott failed to see the differences among the Burgess Shale species and "shoehorned" most of these fossils into existing phyla. Many paleontologists would now take a much less negative view of Walcott's descriptions and of the theoretical perspective that shaped them.
Walcott's work on Ordovician trilobites of New York also tended to be overlooked until, in the early 1990s, Rochester-based amateur paleontologist Thomas Whiteley revived Walcott's research and re-opened the Walcott-Rust quarry near Russia, New York. This localized stata has some of the best preserved Laurentian trilobites ever found, including enrolled specimens with soft body parts.
A peak on Mount Burgess in Canada was named after him. The Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal is awarded by the National Academy of Sciences every five years for outstanding work in the field of pre-Cambrian and Cambrian life and history.
Read more about this topic: Charles Doolittle Walcott
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