Majerus died before he could complete the writing up of his experiments, so the work was carried on by Cook, Grant, Saccheri and Mallet, and published on 8 February 2012 as "Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus." The experiment became the largest ever in the study of industrial melanism, involving 4,864 individuals in a six-year investigation, and it confirmed that melanism in moths is a genuine example of natural selection involving camouflage and predation. Their concluding remark runs: "These data provide the most direct evidence yet to implicate camouflage and bird predation as the overriding explanation for the rise and fall of melanism in moths."