The Cambrian sea was a very strange and alien place. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described the animals that lived there in his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of ...

The environment also became more hospitable, with a warming climate and rising sea levels ... of the Cambrian Explosion is likely exaggerated due to the proliferation of hard-bodied animals ...

During the era of the Cambrian Explosion, some animals evolved to be able to create their own exoskeleton, a process known as sclerotization. Sea creatures went from being soft and flexible to ...

Twenty million years after the Cambrian explosion ... making conditions harmful to a vast number of sea creatures. “Sulfidic waters enriched in [hydrogen sulfide] are lethal for marine animals.

It would be hard to find two animals as dissimilar as the giraffe and an invertebrate sea squirt such as Ciona savignyi, shown here. And yet they share a common Cambrian chordate ancestor.

An exception was the mysterious "small shelly fauna" -- minute shelled animals that are hard to categorize -- that left abundant fossils in the early Cambrian. Recently, minute fossil embryos ...

the shapes and lives of the animals that swam in a Cambrian sea more than 500 million years ago. We can see their weapons, their defensive shells, and their digestive and sensory structures ...