ABSTRACT
If you have ever sat in the shade of western yellow pines and tried to write about fossils you can feel how I felt when I wrote this. A vireo is singing his monotonous phrases, a flycatcher has failed to find the insects buzzing around me and a kingfisher rattles crosslots on his way to the creek. All I see is alive except the pre-Cambrian rocks on which I sit. They contain no fossil animals, or at least none that everybody agrees is a real fossil, although I read that “there is no serious dispute that algae do occur from at least the middle part of the long pre-Cambrian span onward.”1
