A new look at fossils from the Cambrian Period around 500 million years ago has revealed that some of the earliest animals spent time on mudflats that were sometimes exposed to the air – a find that c ...

Learn more about a time period marked by an intense burst ... chordate is Pikaia gracilens, a wormlike creature that swam in middle Cambrian seas. Fossils found in the Burgess Shale of British ...

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 astonishing proliferation of new animal species in the Cambrian period was driven in part by a radical new way of fueling life’s engines: eating other animals. As predators evolved claws to ...

As alien as these creatures seem ... Recent research suggests that the period prior to the Cambrian explosion saw the gradual evolution of a "genetic tool kit" of genes that govern developmental ...

Their discovery confirmed what many scientists had long hypothesized but could not prove: that skeletonized creatures of the Cambrian period, long thought by scientists to be the first ...

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 ...

Researchers think there are now around 7.7 million animal species living on Earth, with thousands more discovered every year.

Most fossils of bilaterian animals are younger, first appearing in the Cambrian period.’ To find such tiny fossils the team used X-ray microtomography, a special technique that uses X-rays to create a ...

during the Cambrian period, known as the ‘Cambrian explosion’. He explains a speculative theory that the evolution of creatures with eyes, such as trilobites, triggered the evolution of more ...