Cambrian

Tardigrades. Water bears. Moss piglets. No matter their name, the microscopic invertebrates are notoriously tough, and now, a team of researchers studied the tardigrade’s ancestors to figure out how the animal evolved.What Drew John Boyega Back Into Sci-Fi? | io9 InterviewThe research team studied lobopodians, a group of extinct soft-bodied worms from the Cambrian Period, and modern tardigrades to determine whichfeatures of the latter group were inherited from the former. The team’s findings were published this week in…

More than a century ago paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott uncovered a very strange fossil in Canada. The finger-sized animal was utterly alien compared to anything around today: it looked like a lobster tail with five eyes and a nozzlelike trunk at one end. This 508-million-year-old organism, named Opabinia regalis, seemed an isolated expression of evolution running riot back in the Cambrian period—before a mass extinction swept such oddities away. But now scientists have discovered that such enigmatic creatures…

Researchers dug up two fossils belonging to ancient, flappy, and snouted arthropod relatives from what's now a sheep field near Llandrindod Wells in Wales.At only 13 and 3 millimeters (about 0.5 and 0.1 inches), these minuscule fossils from the Ordovician period may not seem like much to look at, but their familiarity kept paleontologists up at night.The fossils look like opabiniids – extinct soft-bodied animals with snouts – yet they were dated to 40 million years after any known opabiniid fossil."Even the sheep know we…

Paleontologists have discovered a bizarre worm-like creature from the Cambrian Period that has features associated with three groups of living animals. Just a half-inch long and covered in bristles, the armored Wufengella is providing clues as to how ancient filter-feeders evolved.Wufengella is about 518 million years old, timing it toward the tail-end of the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion was a period of remarkable evolutionary diversification in animal life. Life on the seafloor particularly flourished:…

Amongst thousands of impressions in a large rock surface, one stood out from the crowd. The imprint of a tough tubular exoskeleton topped with waving tentacles, now frozen in time, looked strikingly familiar, unlike any of its neighbors.  It looked just like a relative of corals, anemones, and jellyfish from a sediment layer dated 20 million years before Cnidaria like these were thought to exist."It's nothing like anything else we've found in the fossil record at the time," says paleontologist Frankie Dunn from the…

Perched at over 1,500 meters above sea level, it is difficult to imagine a time when the mountainside Walcott Quarry in Canada – the first excavation site within the Burgess Shale – was submerged by ocean. And yet, that's why it has become one of the world's most famous and unique fossil sites.   508 million years ago, thousands of bizarre creatures were killed instantly by a sudden underwater mudslide that would become the Burgess Shale, creating a time capsule for scientists to peer into the middle Cambrian period. At…

A group of Ediacaran specimens of Fractofusus and Plumeropriscum from the “E” surface, Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland, Canada. Credit: Charlotte G. Kenchington (CC BY 4.0)Metacommunity analysis suggests succession, not mass extinction, explains the Ediacaran diversity drop.Early animals developed complex ecological communities more than 550 million years ago, setting the evolutionary stage for the Cambrian explosion, according to a research study by Rebecca Eden, Emily Mitchell, and colleagues at the…