dramatically. It was the time of the Cambrian Explosion, an eruption of life when Earth’s very first animals began appearing in the fossil record — the ancestors of all major animal groups ...

Imagine a world where the oxygen you need changes dramatically between day and night. Your world shifts from being rich in ...

The Cambrian Explosion saw an incredible diversity of life emerge, including many major animal groups alive today. Among them were the chordates, to which vertebrates (animals with backbones ...

The growth and lifespan of Parvancorina minchami, small anchor-shaped animals that lived on the seafloor about 550 million ...

All animal evolution for the last half billion years has come from tinkering with these Cambrian body plans. Then, between about 570 and 530 million years ago, another burst of diversification ...

Millions more species are believed to be still unknown to science. Arthropods were the most diverse animal group in the Cambrian period and the Ordovician period that followed. The 452-million ...

These complementary datasets enhance our understanding of the nervous systems of early Cambrian animals and highlight the diversity of preservation modes. Ecdysozoans are characterized by a ring ...

Animals living about 500 million years ago spent time on mudflats that were periodically exposed to the air. The finding suggests that some of the earliest animals were able to survive outside of ...

Some animals could likely tell the difference between light and dark, but they never knew whether that looming shadow was a friend or foe. Then, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, life opened ...

A major fossil site bearing witness to the Cambrian explosion and providing evolutionary evidence for early life-forms, it ...

Its end caused an alteration of climate that made possible the proliferation of animal life in Cambrian times There is considerable geological evidence for an extensive glaciation some 600 million ...

Visitors at the Miraculous Life in the Ancient Oceans: Exhibition of Premium Fossils from the Cambrian Chengjiang Biota, held at the Natural History Museum of China in Beijing. WANG QIAN/CHINA ...