Many of the Burgess specimens have now been assigned to living phyla — just where Walcott put them in the first place. Hallucigenia and some others are thought to be related to Onychophora, a group of caterpillar-like animals. Others have been reclassified as precursors of the modern annelids. In fact, says Fortey, "there are relatively few Cambrian designs that are wholly novel. More often they turn out to be just interesting elaborations of well-established designs." As he wrote in his book Life: "None was as strange as a present day barnacle, nor as grotesque as a queen termite."
许多布尔吉斯标本现在已经归到活着的动物的门里——就是沃尔科特最初放置它们的地方。致幻虫和几种别的动物被认为与栉蚕有关系，那是一群毛虫模样的动物。别的已经被重新归类于现代环节动物的先驱。实际上，福泰说：“寒武纪造型只有几种是完全新的。它们更往往证明只是已经确认的形态的有意思的发挥。”他在《生活》杂志上写道：“再奇也奇不过今天的藤壶，再怪也怪不过白蚁后。”

So the Burgess Shale specimens weren't so spectacular after all. This made them, as Fortey has written, "no less interesting, or odd, just more explicable." Their weird body plans were just a kind of youthful exuberance — the evolutionary equivalent, as it were, of spiked hair and tongue studs. Eventually the forms settled into a staid and stable middle age.
所以，布尔吉斯页岩标本原来并非那么不可思议。福泰写道，尽管如此，它们“依然很有意思，依然很古怪，只是能解释得比较清楚了”。它们古怪的体形横剖面只是处于一种生气勃勃的青春阶段——在某种程度上类似于进化中的尖毛和舌尖。最后那些形态进人了固定、稳定的中年阶段。
But that still left the enduring question of where all these animals had come from—how they had suddenly appeared from out of nowhere.
但是，这些动物到底来自何方——它们是怎么突然从无到有的，这仍然是个难以解答的问题。
Alas, it turns out the Cambrian explosion may not have been quite so explosive as all that. The Cambrian animals, it is now thought, were probably there all along, but were just too small to see.
啊呀！寒武纪大爆发被证明也许并非爆发得那样厉害。现在认为，寒武纪的动物很可能早就存在，只是小得看不见罢了。