Soft-body fossils with morphology characteristic of the Cambrian have been uncovered in Morocco, dated 20 million years post-extinction. The 2010 paper by Roy, Orr, Botting, and their collaborators that announced the discovery suggests that …

Jan 28, 2025 · Cambrian explosion, the unparalleled emergence of organisms between 541 million and approximately 530 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period. The event was characterized by the appearance of many of the major phyla (between 20 and 35) that make up modern animal life.

At least four major extinctions occurred during the Cambrian. The first extinction occurred at the Early Cambrian epoch boundary. During this event, the oldest group of trilobites, the olnellids, perished as well as the primary reef-building organisms, the archaeocyathids.

More than 17,000 species are known to have survived until the mega-extinction that ended the Permian period 251 million years ago. A predator of the Cambrian was the giant, shrimplike...

May 27, 2016 · The Cambrian Explosion was a dramatic burst of evolutionary changes in life on Earth. During the Cambrian Period, which began about 540 million years, trilobites were the dominant species.

The Cambrian world was bracketed between two ice ages, one during the late Proterozoic and the other during the Ordovician. During these ice ages, the decrease in global temperature led to mass extinctions. Cooler conditions eliminated many warm water species, and glaciation lowered global sea level.

The end-Botomian mass extinction event, also known as the late early Cambrian extinctions, refer to two extinction intervals that occurred during Stages 4 and 5 of the Cambrian Period, approximately 513 to 509 million years ago.

The Ediacaran biota suffered a mass extinction at the start of the Cambrian Period, which corresponded with an increase in the abundance and complexity of burrowing behaviour. This behaviour had a profound and irreversible effect on the substrate which transformed the …

Feb 16, 2016 · Within several million years, this simple ecosystem would disappear, and give way to a world ruled by highly mobile animals that sported modern anatomical features. The Cambrian explosion, as it...

The dynamics of how metazoan phyla appeared and evolved – known as the Cambrian Explosion – remains elusive. We present a quantitative analysis of the temporal distribution (based on occurrence data of fossil species sampled in each time interval) ...