Scientists have discovered traces of life more than half-a-billion years old that could change the way we think about how all animals evolved on earth. The international team, including ...

Learn more about a time period marked by ... of evolution ever known. The Cambrian Explosion saw an incredible diversity of life emerge, including many major animal groups alive today.

All animal evolution ... kit enabled an unprecedented period of evolutionary experimentation -- and competition. Many forms seen in the fossil record of the Cambrian disappeared without trace.

Then, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, life opened its eyes ... Xiaoya Ma (left) looking for fossils at Chengjiang Three generations of palaeontologists have now studied Chengjiang's fossils, ...

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 ...

Some of the best information about early animals comes from fossils dating back to the Cambrian period, which started around 541 million years ago. During this time, Earth experienced a burst of ...

Misra noticed a fossil-rich slab of mudstone at Newfoundland ... Arthropods were the most diverse animal group in the Cambrian period and the Ordovician period that followed.

Scientists have unraveled the evolutionary history of the ventral nerve cord in ecdysozoan animals ... analysed the fossils from key Cambrian deposits. The fossils included Scalidophora, a ...

Because so little fossil evidence of animals of ... that they subsequently evolved into new forms of animals that continued into the Cambrian period, others say that they were wiped out by extinction.

during an event known as the Cambrian Explosion, when all the major groups of animals were rapidly diversifying". "This rapid period of evolutionary change means that few fossils have been left ...

Trace fossils are preserved in places where subsequent mountain-forming forces did not destroy the original structure of the Cambrian sediments. These trace fossils record the oldest burrowing and ...