Many major groups of animals that have become a mainstay in modern times first appeared during the Cambrian Explosion. However, a new study undertaken by a team of researchers claims that though the ...

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 ...

In a hillside in Yunnan province, southwest China, paleontologists have pulled more than 700 fossils from rock that is roughly 554 million years old. The collection, known as the Jiangchuan Biota, ...

The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside ...

A huge and beautifully preserved suite of fossils discovered in China has cast doubt on the idea that complex life flourished dramatically during a rapid burst of evolution known as the Cambrian ...

More than 539 million years ago, soft, clarinet-shaped animals anchored themselves to the seafloor on disc-shaped bases, swaying alongside stalked animals resembling worms and baskets. These ...

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 ...

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonised almost all environments on Earth – from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But all this ...

New research proposes the Brain-First Hypothesis: the evolution of the brain drove animal diversification during the Cambrian ...