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The marvelous diversification of warship archetypes during the Civil War represents a similar outburst of innovation. Most of Burgess animals left no descendants, representing "roads not taken" in the history of life. The creatures from this one quarry exceeded, in anatomical variation, the entire spectrum of invertebrate life in the ocean today. In the 1989 book Wonderful Life, Gould explores the fauna of the Burgess Shale, animals from just after the Cambrian explosion, half a billion years ago. In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed a theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly in comparatively brief periods of environmental stress, separated by longer periods of evolutionary stability. While the USS Monitor foreshadowed subsequent developments, most of the vessel archetypes of this epoch did not survive the Civil War.

The war occaisioned a unique outburst of experimentation in ship design, with a great variety of new types of ships entering service. The American Civil War, fought between 18, came at a time of transition from ships of wood and men of iron to ships of iron and men of less sturdy composition.