With eyes like searchlights, a mouth of razor-sharp plates, and grasping appendages ready to snatch anything in reach, this ...

Amos The iconic arthropods of the Cambrian were the trilobites, which left a huge number of fossils. Trilobites had flattened, segmented, plated bodies that helped to protect them in seas that ...

Earth’s history is filled with incredible milestones, and the emergence of the first animals is one of the most captivating.

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 ...

As a result, the Cambrian seas were the birthplace of the first mouths, eyes and legs. Some of the odd critters living in these ancient seas included Opabinia, which had five eyes and an elephant ...

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 ...

Life at the start of the Ordovician remained confined to the seas with new animals evolving in place of those that didn't survive the Cambrian. Chief among them were the squidlike nautiloids ...

I had been teaching evolutionary history for more than 19 years, describing to students how life in the prehistoric seas was a testing ground where the familiar adaptations for life originally ...