Cambrian animals would have needed more oxygen ... animal called Cloudina had taken over parts of the microbial reef. Rather than spreading out over the ocean floor, these cone-shaped creatures ...

The Cambrian Explosion saw an incredible diversity ... The sponges added to these reef habitats by building supporting skeletons from calcium carbonate, which they collected from the water.

Primitive Sea Life The middle of the Cambrian Period began with an extinction event. Many of the reef-building organisms died out, as well as the most primitive trilobites. One hypothesis suggests ...

In these ancient reef systems, dead animals usually were ... As life evolved in the Cambrian explosion, animals filled different ecological niches and adopted different body plans.

And yet they share a common Cambrian chordate ancestor ... Photographed at The Elizabeth Moore International Center for Coral Reef Research & Restoration; Specimen from Florida Keys Marine ...

Mary Lonsdale Archaeocyaths were the world’s first reef builders. Common just after the Cambrian explosion, archaeocyaths predate reef-building corals by 40 million years. Like their modern ...

The Cambrian fossil record has been the subject ... 3; April 2019 These observations are significant because reef building represents an important ecological innovation. By growing closely ...

Discovery of this reef revealed important changes were happening in lifeforms millions of years before the Cambrian explosion 542 million years ago. Most major forms and body shapes of animals ...

DURING the Cambrian period, which began 541m years ago, animal life took a remarkable leap forward. The first creatures believed by most (though not all) palaeontologists to be multicellular ...

The Cambrian is rightly famous for being the period when animal life first exploded into a dizzying diversity of forms, including some body plans that remain with us today. But the first animals ...

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 ...