DURING the Cambrian period, which began 541m years ago, animal life took a remarkable leap forward. The first creatures believed by most (though not all) palaeontologists to be multicellular animals ...

More than 100 years ago, Charles Doolittle Walcott from the Smithsonian Institution was asked to examine strange star-shaped fossils with lobes hailing from the ~ 514-million-year-old Conasauga ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Ever since their discovery in 1909, the spectacular Burgess Shale outcrops in the Canadian Rockies have presented scientists with a cornucopia of evidence for the “explosion” of complex, multicellular ...

Considering the fossils of the Cambrian, the oldest fossil-bearing rocks known during his time, Charles Darwin wrote the following in the 6th edition of On the Origin of Species; ... it cannot be ...

If you were to condense the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history into a single calendar year, then sometime from the 18th to the 20th of November, as conventional wisdom would have it, the animal kingdom ...