The Cambrian period, often celebrated for the “Cambrian explosion”, marked a pivotal phase in the history of life when early arthropods emerged and rapidly diversified. These organisms not only ...

A research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) has discovered a new middle Cambrian (5.04 mya) konservat-lagerstätte in the ...

Researchers describe two new species of fossil ctenophores from the mid-Cambrian of Western USA, one of which has a preserved nervous system, which illuminates the early evolution of nervous and ...

This animation created for Evolution: "Great Transformations" depicts creatures whose fossils were found at the Burgess Shale. As alien as these creatures seem, they are also surprisingly familiar.

A crustacean with 3,000 lenses in its eyes, 6-foot-long shrimplike creatures and organisms that looked like tulips emerged hastily (from an evolutionary perspective) on the scene some 520 million to ...

For hundreds of millions of years, the earliest life on Earth mostly took the form of relatively simple organisms. But analysis of the Earth's fossil record shows that there was a remarkable increase ...

When animal life exploded in the oceans more than 500 million years ago, it changed the face of the planet. Now it seems the effects of that burst of evolution reached thousands of kilometres into ...

Mike Lee received funding for this research from the Australian Research Council and Flinders University Greg Edgecombe receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust. John Paterson receives funding from ...

Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill received funding from the John Templeton Foundation and the UK Palaeontological Association. When did animals originate? Evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin may have speculated ...

Extreme fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen levels corresponded with evolutionary surges and extinctions in animal biodiversity during the Cambrian explosion, finds a new study. Extreme fluctuations in ...