12 Facts About Cambrian explosion

Cambrian explosion reasoned that earlier seas had swarmed with living creatures, but that their fossils had not been found because of the imperfections of the fossil record.

Intense modern interest in this "Cambrian explosion" was sparked by the work of Harry B Whittington and colleagues, who, in the 1970s, reanalysed many fossils from the Burgess Shale and concluded that several were as complex as, but different from, any living animals.

Radiometric dates for much of the Cambrian explosion, obtained by analysis of radioactive elements contained within rocks, have only recently become available, and for only a few regions.

Phylogenetic analysis has been used to support the view that during the Cambrian explosion, metazoans evolved monophyletically from a single common ancestor: flagellated colonial protists similar to modern choanoflagellates.

Older fossils indicate that mineralization long preceded the Cambrian explosion, probably defending small photosynthetic algae from single-celled eukaryotic predators.

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Bryozoans, once thought to not appear in the fossil record until after the Cambrian explosion, are now known from strata of Cambrian explosion Age 3 from Australia and South China.

Indeed, statistical analysis shows that the Cambrian explosion was no faster than any of the other radiations in animals' history.

The fossil record is consistent with a Cambrian explosion that was limited to the benthos, with pelagic phyla evolving much later.

Diversity of many Cambrian explosion assemblages is similar to today's, and at a high level, diversity is thought by some to have risen relatively smoothly through the Cambrian explosion, stabilizing somewhat in the Ordovician.

Budd and Mann suggested that the Cambrian explosion was the result of a type of survivorship bias called the "Push of the past".

Cambrian explosion further observed that, where animals lose vision in unlighted environments such as caves, diversity of animal forms tends to decrease.

Whatever triggered the early Cambrian explosion diversification opened up an exceptionally wide range of previously unavailable ecological niches.