What is the main conflict in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould?

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History focuses on a limestone quarry high in the Canadian Rockies known as the Burgess Shale. The Burgess Shale formed 530 million years ago and contains fossils of creatures from an incredibly ancient sea, where a plethora of frighteningly alien creatures lived and died. Stephen Jay Gould, the famous paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science journalist uses the Burgess Shale as a method of teaching the reader about the animals found therein and the evolution of our understanding of these animals' relationships to the organisms of today. However, he has a further purpose as well. He believes that the story of how scientists came to classify the animals of the Burgess Shale can shed light on the nature of history.