All Articles Tagged As: cambrian period

480-million-year-old Fossil Sheds Light On 150-year-old Paleontological Mystery (1/12/2008)

Discovery of an exceptional fossil specimen in southeastern Morocco that preserves evidence of the animal's soft tissues has solved a paleontological puzzle about the origins of an extinct group of bizarre slug-like animals with rows of mineralized armor plates on their backs, according to a paper in Nature. ...> Full Article

2 explosive evolutionary events shaped early history of multicellular life (1/4/2008)

Scientists have known for some time that most major groups of complex animals appeared in the fossils record during the Cambrian Explosion, a seemingly rapid evolutionary event that occurred 542 million years ago. Now Virginia Tech paleontologists, using rigorous analytical methods, have identified another explosive evolutionary event that occurred about 33 million years earlier among macroscopic life forms unrelated to the Cambrian animals. They dubbed this earlier event the "Avalon Explosion." ...> Full Article

Lobster's ancestor enters historical melting pot (10/5/2007)

Professor is part of a team that has uncovered fossils of a new species estimated to be over 500 million years old ...> Full Article