The fossils of the Burgess Shale were hidden in store rooms until the 1960s.[1] When Whittington and his colleagues first began to publish their Burgess finds in the early 1970s, the fossils became central to the debate about how quickly animals arose, and were interpreted as evidence that all the living bilaterian phyla had appeared in the Early Cambrian, along with many other phyla that had become extinct by the end of the Cambrian.[72][79]