Learn more about a time period marked by an intense burst of evolution. 3 min read The Cambrian period, part of the Paleozoic era, produced the most intense burst of evolution ever known.

The question of how so many immense changes occurred in such a short time is ... in the fossil record of the Cambrian disappeared without trace. Once the body plans that proved most successful ...

teeth and shells – but one of the most famous fossil locales in the world, the Burgess Shale, reveals subtle soft body structures like gills and eyes delicately preserved between the layers of dark ...

It belonged to a more obscure period, inhabited by cryptic, otherworldly creatures that most people don’t realize ever existed. “This is the first time that life got big,” Laflamme told me ...

A 555-million-year-old fossil found in South Australia provides crucial evidence for the Precambrian origins of Ecdysozoa, which encompasses insects, crustaceans, and nematodes. The discovery of ...

for the first time, that predation played a pivotal role in the proliferation of early animal ecosystems and shows the rapid speed at which such phenotypic modifications arose during the Cambrian ...