 In developing his initial claim about evolutionary contingency, Gould (1989) made much of the Burgess Shale fauna, exquisite Cambrian fossils from western Canada first described by the American paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott in the early 1900s. Gould was writing in the wake of what some call the “first reclassification” of the Burgess fossils, when work by British paleontologist Harry Blackmore Whittington and students Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris had placed many of the strange forms in their own phyla, with the idea that each phylum represented a unique body plan. Most of those Burgess phyla went extinct, but some (including a likely ancestor of chordates) persisted. But what if that sorting had happened differently? Since 1989, scientists Graham Budd, Allison Daley, and others using cladistic methods of classification (which were slow to be adopted by paleontologists) have reclassified the Burgess fauna yet again, placing many of the strangest ones in stem groups of existing clades (such as arthropods). So one further philosophical question is whether and to what extent this change in taxonomic practice matters to the argument that Gould tried to make about contingency (Brysse 2008).