Imagine a world teeming with life, but not as we know it—a planet bursting with creatures so bizarre they seem plucked ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

Experts disagree about just when the intricate patterns of burrowing creatures first appeared, but by any judgment those traces signaled a big change from the Ediacaran to the Cambrian.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...