This daily feast-and-famine cycle in oxygen availability created an intense physiological challenge for early animals, forcing them to develop adaptations to handle fluctuations in nutrients. For ...

A mysterious fossilized creature discovered more than a century ago has finally been decoded, offering stunning insights into ...

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 ...

Focused on Cambrian fossils, the study reanimates a species long trapped in the pages of forgotten paleontology.

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 ...

For over a century, the Cambrian arthropod Helmetia expansa remained a mystery. Discovered by paleontologist Charles ...

For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely ...

Some animals could likely tell the difference between light and dark, but they never knew whether that looming shadow was a friend or foe. Then, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, life opened ...