known as the "Cambrian Explosion." Among the animals that evolved during this period were the chordates — animals with a dorsal nerve cord; hard-bodied brachiopods, which resembled clams ...

Many animals that evolved during the Cambrian period, 541 million to 485 million years ago, seem bizarre compared with modern life-forms. Even paleontologists sometimes wonder: Why do Cambrian ...

The First Predators: Anomalocaris and Opabinia As animal life evolved, so did the complexity of ecological interactions. The first predators appeared during the Cambrian period, with creatures ...

3 min read The Cambrian period, part of the Paleozoic ... saw a series of mass extinctions during which many shell-dwelling brachiopods and other animals went extinct. The trilobites also suffered ...

The explosion of animal diversity really kicked off during the Cambrian period, about 540 million years ago. The first animals that lived on Earth roamed the seas. The oceans were ruled by jawless ...

The time period often referred to as the Cambrian explosion saw the sudden emergence of most of the planet's modern animal groups. Hard exoskeletons, jointed legs and compound eyes emerged during ...

Hundreds of millions of years ago, before animals began to emerge en masse during the Cambrian period, the Earth’s seas were filled with mysterious, soft-bodied organisms known as “Ediacara ...

Though these animals virtually disappeared at the ... If the precursors to the creatures that arose during the Cambrian Period were swimming in the Ediacaran seas, something had to spark the ...

Basically all life lived in the water, which held a lot of animals that looked pretty ... approximately inch-long terrors lived during the Cambrian period, roughly 500 million years ago.

This Cambrian period critter is now considered ... The evolution of eyes, legs or shells also began during this major divergence of animal groups beginning over 500 million years ago.