Turn that statement around and one has a splendid description of problem-based learning. However to say that Wonderful Life is about paleontology is akin to describing Lolita as a treatise on lepidopterists or Hamlet as a discussion of the Danish rules of succession to high office.
Paleontology is central but the book encompasses a great deal more.
In this instance the well-chosen particulars are the fossils of the Burgess Shale, a small limestone quarry high in the Canadian Rockies discovered in August 1909 by a great American paleontologist, Charles Doolittle Walcott. These remarkable fossils, one of the world's most important collections, appear to represent life in the seas soon after the period, some 570 million years ago, in which virtually all major groups of modern multicellular forms made their appearance. This collection is also special in that it preserves in great detail the soft anatomy of organisms. Walcott, studying these fossils, produced evidence for the existence of primitive ancestral types of later, improved forms. This interpretation remained inviolate until, in the 1960s, a trio of British paleontologists, Henry Whittington and his graduate students Simon Conway Morris and Derek Briggs, re-examined the fossils and came to radically different views about them.