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 ...

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 ...

Pre-Cambrian Animals Until recently the fossils of organisms that lived earlier than the Cambrian period of 500 to 600 million years ago were rare. Now a wealth of such fossils has been found in ...

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 ...

This discovery has the potential to bridge gaps in our knowledge of animal life during the late Cambrian period, spanning between 497 and 485 million years ago. As per the official release, the team ...

Since soon after our planet formed, Earth's 4.6 billion-year-long history was dominated by single-celled life. Something ...