… [Harry] Whittington’s work was brought to widespread popular attention by Stephen Jay Gould in his 1989 bestseller Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.
[F]ew would dispute Gould’s observation that, in his description of the Burgess Shales, Whittington had undertaken some of the most elegant technical work ever accomplished in palaeontology. Gould added that if there was a Nobel Prize in the subject, Whittington and his research team should be the first recipients.
… [Whittington’s removal as chair of a department during an administrative shakeup] probably came as something of a relief to [him], who was in any case too modest a man to care much about status.
His official retirement from the [Cambridge] Woodwardian professorship in 1983 made no difference to Whittington’s routine and he continued to put in a steady morning’s work at the Department of Earth Sciences every day until shortly before his death.
Of some 200 published papers, around 50 were published after his retirement, the last in 2009 shortly before his 93rd birthday…