Cambrian period

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Related to Cambrian period: Devonian period, Cambrian Explosion, Ordovician period, Silurian period

Cambrian period

a geological period which began about 515 million years ago and ended 445 million years ago. At this time the British Isles lay in the southern hemisphere and the Sahara was at the South Pole and subject to extensive glaciation. Trilobites and Brachiopods flourished and most invertebrate phyla had evolved. The first graptolites appeared in the mid-Cambrian, but few traces of plants have been found and these are largely limited to simple algae. see GEOLOGICAL TIME.

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"Yes, we have not fully understood what was driving the repeated 1-2m year cycles of oxygen perturbation during the early Cambrian period. Our findings regarding the coupled C-S isotope cycles and their relationship to animal biodiversity radiation in other parts of the world remains to be confirmed," the researcher added.

Oxygen possibly linked to Cambrian explosion 540m years ago

The famous Burgess Shale is considerably younger, dating at about 505 million years, and the end of the Cambrian Period is set at 490 million years.

The fossil record of the Cambrian "explosion": resolving the tree of life

James Schiffbauer from MU explained that before the Ediacaran and Cambrian Periods, organisms were unicellular and simple.

Scientists unearth over 500-mln-year old rare fossilized embryos

It was only recently that the scientists found these minuscule tunnels that dated back to the Cambrian period -- 543 to 490 million years ago -- following another analysis of the rock samples.

See 500-Million-Year-Old Worm 'Superhighway' Discovered In Canada

The deposition of banded iron formations, which began approximately 3.8 billion years ago, had long been thought to terminate before the beginning of the Cambrian Period at 540 million years ago.

Earth's Youngest Banded Iron Formation Found

The 3-inch-long fossil was entombed in fine dustlike particles - now preserved as fine-grain mudstone - during the Cambrian Period 520 million years ago in what today is the Yunnan province in China.

520-million-year-old shrimp-like creatures had 'modern' hearts and blood vessels

The problem was this: the base of the Cambrian period, originally defined by Adam Sedgwick, was signified by the presence of trilobites, as well as other macroscopic fossils such as linguliform brachiopods and some strange echinoderms.

The Cambrian Explosion: how much bang for the buck?

Erik Sperling an earth scientist at Harvard University, and colleagues say an increase in oxygen in the geologic record at the onset of the Cambrian period allowed carnivores to evolve.

Oxygen aided carnivore evolution: explosion of animal diversity attributed to rise of predators

The rise of unambiguous animals at the beginning of the Cambrian period, about 542 million years ago, was a fundamental turning point in evolution, and the Burgess Shale is one of the best places to study it.

The origins of modern diversity: deciphering clues from the Burgess Shale to understand early life

This book is both a scientific report and a personal journal of Brasiers quest to solve a mystery that puzzled Darwin himself: Why did there appear to be an absence of animal fossils in rocks older than the Cambrian period? This, says Brasier, is the "Lost World that was later found to have spanned more than eighty percent of Earth history."Brasier begins with a wonderful journalistic technique: bringing the reader into Darwins home in January 1859.

Darwins Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life

The earliest arthropods arose in the oceans and were already high-ly developed in the early Cambrian Period (570 million years ago) with the marine trilobites.

Amateurs find fossil of `world's oldest spider'

From the following Cambrian period the country lay under the sea, a sea which from fossil records contained shellfish, worms and armoured trilobites, woodlouse look-a-likes which skimmed along the sea bed scavenging foo The Devonian Period (360-408 million years ago) can be found represented in rocks in the north of the county and were laid down in a period when north Warwickshire consisted of wide river deltas, home to large bottom- feeding armoured fish.