Rather than a constant upward trajectory of evolution, it’s been billions of years of boom-and-bust cycles – first an explosion of life, and then a mass extinction of all but the most hardy hangers-on ...

The Cambrian explosion was an extraordinary phenomenon in the evolution of life on the planet that led to the emergence of ...

Researchers have unearthed numerous fossils from the Cambrian period. (Image credit: NPS) Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist at Harvard University who studies Cambrian and Ordovician fossils, told ...

A new study of ancient fossil trails pushes the origins of complex life deeper into Earth’s history, before the Cambrian Period began.

The fossilized time capsule from Castle Bank is from the middle of the Ordovician Period, about 462 million years ago. Search for ... a big gap has existed between thes Cambrian and Ordovician eras.

500 million years ago, the world was a very different place. During this period of time, known as the Cambrian period, basically all life was in the water. The ocean was brimming with animals that ...

During the Cambrian Explosion more than 500 million years ago, ... The fossils hail from Morocco’s Fezouata Formation, a deposit dating back to the Early Ordovician period, ...

While it wasn’t as big a burst of evolution as the Cambrian explosion, the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE) saw bivalves catch up for lost time. During this period they went from four ...

Fig.1: Tempo and mode in the body size evolution of Cambrian-Ordovician trilobites. Changes in maximum size (red) and mean size (blue) for each time slice, with lines and shading representing the ...

"This could explain why fossil communities dating from the Cambrian and Ordovician periods (around 500 million years ago) are dominated by arthropods," states Nora Corthésy.