How and why the Cambrian explosion occurred has been the subject of debate ever since fossils of this remarkable event were ...

Around 540 million years ago, the ocean erupted with complex life: Creatures rapidly transformed from simple, soft-bodied, ocean-floor-dwelling animals into bodies we might recognize today—animals ...

Scientists have uncovered the earliest fossil evidence of annelids (ringed worms) in Cambrian microfossils dating back ...

The Cambrian is a geologic period of the Paleozoic Era, spanning approximately 539–485 million years ago, characterized by a major diversification of multicellular life known as the Cambrian explosion ...

A site in southwestern China holds a wide array of strange life-forms that emerged prior to the Cambrian explosion, and it pushes back the origin of complex life by millions of years. When you ...

Scientists from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have uncovered the ...

If you trace the animal family tree back through the fossil record, the trail usually goes cold about 539 million years ago. Before this boundary—the start of the famous Cambrian explosion—multicelled ...

An illustration of the fossils' environment around 539 million to 554 million years ago Xiaodong Wang Life on Earth started sometime before 3.5 billion years ago, although it was clearly in no rush to ...