Even paleontologists sometimes wonder: Why do Cambrian creatures look so strange? All of these odd-looking animals evolved at a special time in Earth's history, said Javier Ortega-Hernández ...

The Cambrian sea was a very strange and alien place. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described the animals that lived there in his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of ...

But the Cambrian fossil record is also rife with forms only distantly related to animals on Earth today, some of which were so weird that the sight of a reconstruction of the creatures made ...

"It is exceptionally rare, but it shows us just how strange and varied the shapes of early animals could be." The find also reveals the ecology of the Cambrian seas, Hearing added. "It tells us ...

This bonanza is known as the Cambrian explosion. Based on the fossil record, animal life appeared to be ... Ediacaran organisms is they have this strange fractal branching—they had branches ...

Animal fossils from before that time are typically ... We know of the existence of many strange Cambrian creatures because they have been recovered from sites of exceptional preservation which ...

an animal that resembled modern elephants but with a unique feature—its tusks curved downwards instead of upwards. These strange tusks were likely used for stripping bark or digging roots.

Among the cast of strange beings was Opabinia ... Such a feeding strategy was unique among Cambrian animals. The proboscis likely allowed Opabinia to probe the seafloor for soft-bodied prey ...

canadensis was one of the largest animals to live 541 million ... temperatures and tectonic changes of the Cambrian. Roughly translating to “weird shrimp from Canada” in Latin, A.