Experts disagree about just when the intricate patterns of burrowing creatures first appeared, but by any judgment those traces signaled a big change from the Ediacaran to the Cambrian.

High in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, the animals of an ancient ecosystem can be seen battling for life. The fossils of the Burgess Shale offer a glimpse at the incredible diversity of early life on ...

The earliest known primitive chordate is Pikaia gracilens, a wormlike creature that swam in middle Cambrian seas. Fossils found in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia show traces of a notochord ...

During the era of the Cambrian Explosion, some animals evolved to be able to create their own exoskeleton, a process known as sclerotization. Sea creatures went from being soft and flexible to ...

As alien as these creatures seem, they are also surprisingly ... the last half billion years has come from tinkering with these Cambrian body plans. Then, between about 570 and 530 million years ...

Despite its odd appearance, the Cambrian creature Odaraia alata—an arthropod whose taco-shaped carapace gives it an otherworldly appearance—is one of those good ideas. While its protective ...

Their discovery confirmed what many scientists had long hypothesized but could not prove: that skeletonized creatures of the Cambrian period, long thought by scientists to be the first ...

All the Latest Game Footage and Images from Cambrian Dawn Journey to a time long forgotten... In this thrilling underwater world of strange and beautiful creatures, only the strongest species will ...

Most creatures were blind, so colour was of little use ... Then, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, life opened its eyes. In the 15 million years that followed the evolution of vision, most of ...

known as the ‘Cambrian explosion’. He explains a speculative theory that the evolution of creatures with eyes, such as trilobites, triggered the evolution of more complex forms of life.