Just over half a billion years ago, Earth was rocked by a global mass extinction event, a dramatic interruption of the ...

The most famous example of such exquisitely preserved Cambrian fossils is the Burgess Shale of Canada.

A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota: Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower ...

The exceptionally well-preserved fossils shine a light on the mass extinction that brought an end to the "Biological Big Bang." ...

The Ediacara Biota are some of the strangest fossils ever found—soft-bodied organisms preserved in remarkable detail where ...

Around 530 million years ago, the planet teemed with life after the Cambrian explosion, when most major animal groups we see today started to appear in the fossil record. Most of this abundance was ...

(CNN) — Paleontologists have discovered remarkable fossils in the Grand Canyon that reveal fresh details about the emergence of complex life half a billion years ago. The newfound remains of fauna ...

Sometime before 520 million years ago, animal life began to flourish as never before. The small shells, worms and even sponge-like enigmas of earlier eras suddenly unfolded into a new array of species ...

This animation created for Evolution: "Great Transformations" depicts creatures whose fossils were found at the Burgess Shale. As alien as these creatures seem, they are also surprisingly familiar.

Animal life seemed to explode into a wide variety of new forms in the Cambrian period. Sun et al. (2002). National Science Review. via Wikipedia under CC By 4.0 Sometime before 520 million years ago, ...