Our new study reveals a different, often overlooked factor. Daily swings in oxygen levels on the shallow seafloor may have ...

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 ...

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 growth and lifespan of Parvancorina minchami, small anchor-shaped animals that lived on the seafloor about 550 million ...

An exception was the mysterious "small shelly fauna" -- minute shelled animals that are hard to categorize -- that left abundant fossils in the early Cambrian. Recently, minute fossil embryos ...

Visitors at the Miraculous Life in the Ancient Oceans: Exhibition of Premium Fossils from the Cambrian Chengjiang Biota, held at the Natural History Museum of China in Beijing. WANG QIAN/CHINA ...

Animals living about 500 million years ago spent time on mudflats that were periodically exposed to the air. The finding suggests that some of the earliest animals were able to survive outside of ...

These complementary datasets enhance our understanding of the nervous systems of early Cambrian animals and highlight the diversity of preservation modes. Ecdysozoans are characterized by a ring ...

Worminess wasn’t the only factor that brought oblivion to the Ediacarans and triggered the Cambrian explosion—there also were changes in ocean chemistry that allowed animals to acquire hard ...

My research is broadly concerned with the evolutionary origins of animals. I focus on a pivotal interval in Earth’s history, the late Ediacaran–Cambrian (~571 to 485 million years ago), which saw the ...

Patches of photosensitive cells were probably common long before the Cambrian, allowing early animals to detect light and sense what direction it was coming from. Such rudimentary visual organs ...