This daily feast-and-famine cycle in oxygen availability created an intense physiological challenge for early animals, forcing them to develop adaptations to handle fluctuations in nutrients. For ...

In a quiet part of what is now South Australia, more than half a billion years ago, life was locked in battle. The ocean ...

For over a century, the Cambrian arthropod Helmetia expansa remained a mystery. Discovered by paleontologist Charles ...

Focused on Cambrian fossils, the study reanimates a species long trapped in the pages of forgotten paleontology.

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 ...

Our study suggests a similar pattern played out in the Cambrian. Animals evolved ways to cope with the stress of fluctuating oxygen levels on the smorgasbord of the shallow seafloor shelves.

the earliest known chordate—the group of animals that would later evolve into vertebrates. This was the full flowering of the “Cambrian explosion,” the sudden appearance of a vast new ...

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 ...

For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely ...

This was also the time when animal diversity boomed, in what is known as the “Cambrian explosion” . My team's new research suggests that these drastic oxygen fluctuations played a crucial role ...

In a new study published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, Harvard researchers in the Department of Organismic and ...

This was also the time when animal diversity boomed, in what is known as the “Cambrian explosion”. My team’s new research suggests that these drastic oxygen fluctuations played a crucial role in this ...