Evidence for a geologic trigger of the Cambrian Explosion
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 - 14:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of nearly all animals on Earth today. Then something happened. Over several tens of millions of years -- a relative blink of an eye in geologic terms -- a burst of evolution led to a flurry of diversification and increasing complexity, including the expansion of multicellular organisms and the appearance of the first shells and skeletons.