For decades, scientists could not agree on whether to classify the Dickinsonia as an animal or not — until this new study ...

Imagine a world teeming with life, but not as we know it—a planet bursting with creatures so bizarre they seem plucked ...

A remarkable fossilized larva has been discovered by scientists with its brain and guts still intact. The fossilized creature ...

Photograph by James L. Amos The iconic arthropods of the Cambrian were the trilobites, which left a huge number of fossils. Trilobites had flattened, segmented, plated bodies that helped to ...

It has long been suspected that the sparseness of the pre-Cambrian fossil record reflects these two problems. First, organisms may not have sequestered and secreted much in the way of fossilizable ...

Three of its weapons are visible in the fossil shown here: claws, propulsive swimming flaps, and at the base of the claws, eyes on eyestalks. The emergence of vision in the Cambrian helped both ...

Charles Darwin, refining his theory of evolution in the 1860s, famously lamented the total lack of fossils older than those from the Cambrian Period. The “difficulty of assigning any good reason ...

Cambrian fossils are known from many sites, but usually only from remains of shells and other hard parts; here, owing to some accident of geology, entire organisms were preserved with eyes ...

Now, with access to uniquely well-preserved Cambrian fossils, Dr Greg Edgecombe and Dr Xiaoya Ma are seeing the evolution of vision through the world's oldest eyes. To understand the eyes of ancient ...

For over a century, the Cambrian arthropod Helmetia expansa remained a mystery. Discovered by paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott in 1918, it was initially classified as a crustacean.

Others in the paleontological community took the fossils as evidence of a more slow and steady animal evolution than the Cambrian explosion model would suggest.Now, Bengtson says, Matz has found an ...

It has long been suspected that the sparseness of the pre-Cambrian fossil record reflects these two problems. First, organisms may not have sequestered and secreted much in the way of fossilizable ...