Cambrian animals evolved skeletons. Medical search. Frequent questions

Scientists often refer to this sudden, dramatic increase in the variety of animal fossils as the Cambrian Explosion. (worldbook.com)
During the Cambrian Explosion, animals evolved (developed gradually) into many new forms and spread throughout Earth's oceans. (worldbook.com)
During the Cambrian explosion , which began around 540 million years ago, diverse animal (metazoan) skeletons appeared suddenly in the fossil record. (palaeontologyonline.com)
The ability to grow a resistant skeleton was a major factor in the evolutionary arms races of the Phanerozoic eon - the time since the Cambrian explosion - and it made possible the dizzying variety of shells, bones and teeth scattered throughout the Phanerozoic fossil record. (palaeontologyonline.com)
Around 550 million years ago, mysterious fossils with calcium carbonate skeletons appeared in limestones all over the world: in China, Spain, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Namibia, Canada and the United States, like a foreshadowing of the Cambrian explosion. (palaeontologyonline.com)
Consequently, the alleged discovery of sponge-like fossils from layers prior to the Cambrian explosion, which gave rise to all the more complex animal phyla, was welcomed by evolutionary biologists as clear confirmation of Darwin's theory. (evolutionnews.org)
The evidence seemed convincing enough that even most critics of Darwinian evolution acknowledged the existence of sponges prior to the Cambrian explosion (e.g. (evolutionnews.org)
Coronacollina has been called the oldest organism with a skeleton and in this way considered as a precursor to the Cambrian explosion ( UC Riverside 2012 ). (evolutionnews.org)
Does lengthening the 'timeframe' of the Cambrian explosion make it easier for evolutionists to explain? (creation.com)
I've come across a number of articles written in the past 4-5 years describing the Cambrian Explosion as having occurred over the course of about 25-55 million years. (creation.com)
What if the 'Cambrian explosion' were longer? (creation.com)
First, it might help to make sure that you properly understand what the 'Cambrian explosion' really is. (creation.com)
The Cambrian Explosion - Biology's Big Bang? (allaboutscience.org)
The Cambrian Explosion relates to an abrupt appearance of a wide range of organisms, mainly invertebrates, with hard (fossilizable) parts in Cambrian strata which mainstream scientists date from about 540 million years ago. (allaboutscience.org)
The Cambrian Explosion - Is it curtains for Darwinism? (allaboutscience.org)
One attempt to account for the Cambrian explosion involves the proposal that there was a substantial increase in oxygen about this time which stimulated rapid evolutionary progress -- but such a suggestion ignores the sheer improbability of biological macromolecules, whether oxygen is plentiful or not. (allaboutscience.org)
The Cambrian explosion raises the kinds of questions that occur repeatedly regarding the fossil record. (allaboutscience.org)
This is what's commonly referred to as the Cambrian explosion . (salon.com)
The appearance of multicellular animals occurs in an event known as the Cambrian explosion. (answersingenesis.org)
A wide variety of body plans appears "suddenly" in the fossil record about 550 million years ago-known as the Cambrian explosion. (answersingenesis.org)
The Cambrian Explosion is often used to describe the rapid burst of biodiversity that occurred during the Cambrian Period, and it's the first time that many major animal groups pop up in the fossil record. (earth.com)
According to Degnan, essentially all the genomic innovations that we deem necessary for intricate modern animal life have their origins much further back in time that anyone anticipated, predating the Cambrian explosion by tens if not hundreds of millions of years. (berkeley.edu)
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, reveals that following the Cambrian explosion, the amount of phosphorus, a vital nutrient for life, in crustal rocks tripled. (thedailyscience.org)
They discovered that phosphorus levels in crustal rocks have steadily increased since the Cambrian explosion, up to the present day. (thedailyscience.org)
The researchers propose that an increase in oxygen during the Cambrian explosion could explain the rise in phosphorus levels in rocks. (thedailyscience.org)
The results of this Cambrian explosion are well documented in the fossil record, but its cause - why and when it happened, and perhaps why nothing similar has happened since - has been a mystery. (wisc.edu)
We're proposing a triggering mechanism for the Cambrian explosion," says Peters. (wisc.edu)
Chordate fossils have been found from as early as the Cambrian explosion , 539 million years ago. (findatwiki.com)

Before: After: Sessile organism anchored in mat Animal grazing on mat Animals embedded in mat Animals burrowing just under mat =Microbial mat Firm, layered, anoxic, sulphidic substrate Animals moving on / in surface of sea-floor Loose, oxygenated upper substrate with burrowing animals The "Cambrian substrate revolution" or "Agronomic revolution", evidenced in trace fossils, is a sudden diversification of animal burrowing during the early Cambrian period. (wikipedia.org)
Some Cambrian trace fossils indicate that their makers possessed hard (although not necessarily mineralised) exoskeletons. (wikipedia.org)
The entire Phanerozoic period from Cambrian to recent, defined by the first appearance of abundant skeletonized animal fossils is about 540 million years. (blogspot.com)
The accepted date for the origin of metazoans based on fossils and molecular phylogeny is in the NeoProterozoic between 700-600 million years ago, and the body and skeletal fossil record of that and the slightly younger early Cambrian indicates several rapid evolutionary radiations whereby successive grades of complex animals evolved geologically rapidly and filled empty ecologic niches. (blogspot.com)
The huge fossil site, located in Marble Canyon in Kootenay National Park in southeastern British Columbia, contains hundreds of magnificently preserved fossils of early animals from the Cambrian , a period in Earth's history that lasted from about 543 million to 490 million years ago. (worldbook.com)
So far, scientists have found the fossils of more than 50 invertebrate (animals without backbones) species, about a dozen of which have never been seen before. (worldbook.com)
Many major types of animals first appear in fossils from the early Cambrian Period. (worldbook.com)
The fossils unearthed from the Marble Canyon site will help researchers better understand the conditions of the marine ecosystem that spurred the rapid diversification of animal forms during the Cambrian Period. (worldbook.com)
Moysiuk and coauthors Martin Smith at Durham University in the United Kingdom, and Jean-Bernard Caron at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and U of T were able to complete the descriptions based mainly on newly discovered fossils from the renowned Cambrian Burgess Shale in British Columbia. (archaeology.wiki)
Molecular clocks and sponge biomarkers (molecules produced by sponges) both suggest that sponges had also evolved by this time, and many modern sponges construct skeletons from silica or calcium carbonate, but so far, there are no universally accepted sponge fossils of this age. (palaeontologyonline.com)
This site, a former oil shale mine, is significant because it has exceptionally well-preserved fossils of more than a thousand species of plants and animals from the Eocene Epoch. (sciencenews.org)
Now, it can be granted that organisms without skeletons will leave few if any fossils, so it should not be too surprising if one evolving line were to appear suddenly in the fossil record. (allaboutscience.org)
If they diverged at the beginning of the Cambrian then it does some way to explaining the absence of preceding fossils but then it remains inexplicable how the wide divergence of characteristics occurred so suddenly, i.e. that the various phyla appear so different as to be unrelated. (allaboutscience.org)
There is no sign of intermediary fossils and there is certainly no consensus as to how they could potentially have evolved from a common ancestor. (allaboutscience.org)
When large, complex fossils were discovered in the Ediacaran, researchers naturally expected that many of them would represent early relatives of the same animal groups that had been recognized in the Cambrian. (salon.com)
Streptelasma, extinct genus of corals, existing as single animals rather than colonial forms and found as fossils. (britannica.com)
Stromatoporida, extinct order of corals found as fossils in marine rocks of Cambrian to Cretaceous age (542 million. (britannica.com)
Tabulata, major division of extinct coral animals found as fossils in Ordovician to Jurassic marine rocks (488. (britannica.com)
Tetragraptus, genus of extinct graptolites (colonial animals related to the chordates) that occur as fossils in. (britannica.com)
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past. (absoluteastronomy.com)
The shorter the lifespan of a species, the more precisely different sediments can be correlated, and so rapidly evolving types of fossils are particularly valuable. (absoluteastronomy.com)
That sea sponge hanging in your shower may be able to trace its evolutionary lineage to nearly a billion years ago, according to fossils that could be the oldest examples of animal life on Earth. (livescience.com)

Around the start of the Cambrian, organisms began to burrow vertically, forming a great diversity of different fossilisable burrow forms and traces as they penetrated the sediment for protection or to feed. (wikipedia.org)
If these burrows are biogenic (made by organisms) they imply the presence of motile organisms with heads, which would probably have been bilaterans (bilaterally symmetrical animals). (wikipedia.org)
However, it appears that organisms did not feed upon the sediment itself until after the Cambrian. (wikipedia.org)
Predatory behaviour first appeared over 1 billion years ago, but predation on large organisms appears to have first become significant shortly before the start of the Cambrian. (wikipedia.org)
Most of the limestone on Earth today originally came from the skeletons of marine organisms that settled onto the seafloor and were compressed into rock. (palaeontologyonline.com)
Despite nearly 70 years of careful study , paleontologists have yet to identify key features among them that would allow us to understand how these organisms are related to modern animals. (salon.com)
Rather than looking for characteristics that would allow us to shoehorn some of these organisms into known animal groups, we've taken a different approach . (salon.com)
According to evolutionists, as these organisms continued to evolve, they invaded the land and had to overcome the many challenges that they faced there. (answersingenesis.org)
Very little is understood about how so many new species evolved when for millions of years prior during the Ediacaran Period, life on Earth consisted of single-celled and later complex organisms that only lived deep below the ocean's surface. (earth.com)
In a relatively short period of time, simple, soft-bodied creatures evolved into complex multicellular organisms with shells and skeletons. (thedailyscience.org)
Within the oceans, organisms such as plankton and eukaryotic algae metabolize phosphorus, and these organisms are consumed by larger animals in the food chain. (thedailyscience.org)
once considered a vast kingdom of eukaryotic organisms, primararily unicellular, or simple multicellular ( Biology , 6th Ed., 2002), now 'kingdom protista' no longer considered a clade, but considered to be the first eukaryotes to evolve ( Biology , 10th Ed., 2015, p. 533). (emergentearth.com)
Over several tens of millions of years - a relative blink of an eye in geologic terms - a burst of evolution led to a flurry of diversification and increasing complexity, including the expansion of multicellular organisms and the appearance of the first shells and skeletons. (wisc.edu)

All animals share a common ancestor that evolved in the primitive seas over 600 (or 700) million years ago from colonial protists. (answersingenesis.org)
In the other hypothesis, they are interpreted as primitive chordates that retain a calcite skeleton from a more remote common ancestor of echinoderms and chordates, and the stalk contains muscle blocks, a notochord and a brain. (nature.com)
This may come as a surprise to Meyer, but insects' and mammals' common ancestor was before even the Cambrian. (skepticink.com)
All living animals are descended from the common ancestor of sponges and humans, which lived more than 600 million years ago. (berkeley.edu)

They first evolved in the Cambrian, or possibly even the Precambrian, and died out in the Triassic-Jurassic extinction. (lifebeforethedinosaurs.com)

Long believed to belong to the same family as snails, squid and other molluscs, a study published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature shows that hyoliths are instead more closely related to brachiopods - a group of animals which has a rich fossil record, although few living species remain today. (archaeology.wiki)
Therefore, evolutionists would expect to find such sponges as the earliest animals in the fossil record. (evolutionnews.org)
Carpoids evolved during the Middle Cambrian Period and disappear from the fossil record during the early Devonian Period. (fossilera.com)
The first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record defines the base of the Atdabanian stage of the Early Cambrian period , and they flourished throughout the lower Paleozoic era before. (absoluteastronomy.com)

Sponges are sessile marine invertebrates that are considered to be the most basal and most "primitive" branch of the multicellular animals (Metazoa). (evolutionnews.org)
There are four classes of sponges, all of which appear abruptly in the Cambrian. (allaboutscience.org)
Despite their primitive form, the sponges are quite separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. (allaboutscience.org)
Sponges and cnidarians were the first groups of animals to evolve over 650 million years ago. (answersingenesis.org)
Sponges are often described as the "simplest" living animals, while humans are considered relatively "complex," but how this differential complexity is encoded in the genome is still a major question in biology The new study shows that, while the sponge genome contains most of the gene families found in humans, the number of genes in each family has changed significantly over the past 600 million years. (berkeley.edu)
Future studies will reveal how sponges operate as bona fide animals without those components, and how the addition of those components led to the evolution of more complex animals. (berkeley.edu)
But under a microscope , the preserved organic tissue revealed a mesh-like structure that was strikingly similar to that of skeleton fibers in modern bath sponges, which are part of a soft-bodied-sponge group known as keratose demosponges, or horny sponges. (livescience.com)
Paleontologists already consider sponges to be good candidates for the earliest form of animal life. (livescience.com)

Although there are many different ways to build a skeleton, the basic molecular toolkit required seems to be surprisingly uniform - so much so, in fact, that the mother-of-pearl inside an oyster shell can be used to encourage growth in vertebrate bone, because the organic molecules that the oyster uses to biomineralize are so similar to those used by vertebrates. (palaeontologyonline.com)
A team of scientists has now conducted a study of yunnanozoans, extinct creatures from the early Cambrian period (518 million years ago), and discovered evidence that they are the oldest known stem vertebrates. (scitechdaily.com)
Over the years, as researchers have studied how vertebrates evolved, a key focus of research has been the pharyngeal arches. (scitechdaily.com)
Scientists have hypothesized that the pharyngeal arch evolved from an unjointed cartilage rod in vertebrate ancestors, such as the chordate amphioxus, a close invertebrate relative of the vertebrates. (scitechdaily.com)
Two types of pharyngeal skeletons-the basket-like and isolated types-occur in the Cambrian and living vertebrates. (scitechdaily.com)
The earliest flying vertebrates, the pterosaurs, evolved during the late Triassic. (paleoportal.org)

It now appears that the evolution of these genes not only allowed the first animals to colonize the ancient oceans, but underpinned the evolution of the full biodiversity of animals we see today. (berkeley.edu)
In the April 19 issue of the journal Nature, he and colleague Robert Gaines of Pomona College report that the same geological forces that formed the Great Unconformity may have also provided the impetus for the burst of biodiversity during the early Cambrian. (wisc.edu)

Today, the growth of carbonate skeletons is one of the main ways in which carbon is removed from the oceans, particularly in tropical reefs, which have been estimated to have the highest rate of calcium carbonate production in the world. (palaeontologyonline.com)
There are more than 60 different biominerals, but animals use only a few of these to build skeletons: mostly calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate or silica. (palaeontologyonline.com)
A Cambrian trilobite, with a shell made of calcium carbonate. (wisc.edu)
The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.A coral "head" is a colony of. (absoluteastronomy.com)

This implies that the form of pharyngeal skeletons has a more complex early evolutionary history than previously thought," said TIAN Qingyi, the first author of the study, from Nanjing University and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. (scitechdaily.com)
Soft parts, such as skin impressions of dinosaurs, and soft-bodied animals like jellyfish are sometimes preserved, and in some localities may be common, but they give us only brief glimpses of evolutionary histories. (answersingenesis.org)
Evolutionary relationships of animal phyla are based on DNA and molecular evidence due to the lack of fossil evidence of ancestral species. (answersingenesis.org)
Lungs and other organs have evolved independently in terrestrial animals, including mollusks and arthropods, as some mollusks lost their shells in recent evolutionary development. (answersingenesis.org)
Farish Jenkins, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University said: "This represents a critical early phase in the evolution of all limbed animals, including humans - albeit a very ancient step. (uncommondescent.com)

Examination of the orientation of the helens in multiple hyolith specimens from the Burgess Shale suggests that these spines may have been used like stilts to lift the body of the animal above the sediment, elevating the feeding apparatus to enhance feeding. (archaeology.wiki)
The Burgess Shale is one of the most important fossil deposits for studying the origin and early evolution of animals that took place during the Cambrian period, starting about 542 million years ago. (archaeology.wiki)

The earliest skeletons were not built by animals at all, but by microorganisms. (palaeontologyonline.com)
The 100 Myr gap separating the Cambrian appearance of vertebrates4-6 from the earliest three-dimensionally preserved vertebrate neurocrania7 further obscures the origins of modern states. (bvsalud.org)
This suggests that, in the earliest gnathostomes, the neurocranium filled out the space between the dermal skeleton and brain, like in galeaspids, osteostracans and placoderms and unlike in cyclostomes2. (bvsalud.org)
The shoulder, elbow and even parts of the wrist are already there and working in ways similar to the earliest land-living animals. (uncommondescent.com)

A team of scientists led by 20-year-old University of Toronto (U of T) undergraduate student Joseph Moysiuk has finally determined what a bizarre group of extinct cone-shaped animals actually are. (archaeology.wiki)
A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals! (blubrry.net)
His research has long focused on trilobites , a fossil group of extinct arthropods (joint legged animals) that were around for at least 250 million years. (we-make-money-not-art.com)

Cats are all chordates, having a backbone and an internal skeleton. (creation.com)
Among the vertebrate sub-group of chordates the notochord develops into the spine , and in wholly aquatic species this helps the animal to swim by flexing its tail. (findatwiki.com)

The animal lived in the Devonian era lasting from 417m to 354m years ago, and had a skull, neck, and ribs similar to early limbed animals (known as tetrapods), as well as a more primitive jaw, fins, and scales akin to fish. (uncommondescent.com)

For marine animals, like coral, who use biomineralization to build reefs, ocean acidification is bad news. (smithsonianmag.com)
Our hypothesis is that biomineralization evolved as a biogeochemical response to an increased influx of continental weathering products during the last stages in the formation of the Great Unconformity. (wisc.edu)

From the very start of the Cambrian period (about 538.8 million years ago) many new types of traces first appear, including well-known vertical burrows such as Diplocraterion and Skolithos, and traces normally attributed to arthropods, such as Cruziana and Rusophycus. (wikipedia.org)
During the Cambrian Period, the region lay at the bottom of a shallow ocean. (worldbook.com)
The Cambrian Period was an important time in the history of life on Earth. (worldbook.com)
Known as hyoliths, these marine creatures evolved over 530 million years ago during the Cambrian period and are among the first animals known to have produced mineralized external skeletons. (archaeology.wiki)
Many animal groups evolved mineralized skeletons independently during the Cambrian period (541 million years ago to 485 million years ago), suggesting that they might have co-opted the same set of genes. (palaeontologyonline.com)
In summary, what is generally proposed, is the extraordinary coincidence that these diverse types of organism with their radically different skeletons all reached fossilizable stage within a relatively short period of time. (allaboutscience.org)
It segues into the succeeding Cambrian geological period, which saw the first appearance of many of the animal groups we recognize in the present day. (salon.com)
The adaptability of microbial communities to live and thrive in extreme environments was critical to their survival and persistence after life exploded during the Cambrian period roughly 540 million years ago. (smithsonianmag.com)
570 million years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian period, life on Earth began rapidly diversifying and changing. (earth.com)
First, the researchers used sea anemones to test if there was an optimal temperature for animals to survive with low levels of oxygen similar to oxygen levels in the ocean during the Ediacaran Period. (earth.com)

Many of the animals can be identified as types of worms and arthropods (animals with jointed legs). (worldbook.com)
Arthropods (e.g. lobsters, crabs, insects) have no backbone and have an external skeleton. (creation.com)
Similarly, as far as the arthropods are concerned, the different subphyla of trilobites, horseshoe crabs and crustaceans arise in the Cambrian. (allaboutscience.org)
Arthropods evolved from annelids over 600 million years ago in three distinct groups. (answersingenesis.org)

2007, 2008, 2012 ), or a sponge-like animal related to the Cambrian Archaeocyatha or even as a true sponge (Fedonkin 1996, McMenamin 1998: 38-39). (evolutionnews.org)
One example of a Cambrian-appearing organism is the sponge. (allaboutscience.org)
The sponge, which was not recognized as an animal until the 19th century, is now the simplest and most ancient group of animals to have their genome sequenced. (berkeley.edu)
In a paper appearing in the August 5 issue of the journal Nature , a team of researchers led by Daniel Rokhsar of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI), report the draft genome sequence of the sea sponge Amphimedon queenslandica and several insights the genome gives into the origins of both the first animals and cancer. (berkeley.edu)
A sponge-like creature may have been the first organism with more than one cell type and the ability to develop from a fertilized egg produced by the merger of sperm and egg cells - that is, an animal. (berkeley.edu)
Though we think of a sponge as a simple creature whose skeleton we take to the bathtub, it has a lot of the major biochemical and developmental pathways we associate with complex functions in humans and other more complex animals," she said. (berkeley.edu)
Though CDK4/6 was not found in the sponge genome, it is present in the sea anemone genome, raising the question of whether the appearance of CDK4/6 in the ancestor of "true" animals (eumetazoans) changed the animal cell cycle in a fundamental way. (berkeley.edu)
This incredibly old ancestor possessed the same core building blocks for multicellular form and function that still sits at the heart of all living animals, including humans," said coauthor Bernie Degnan, a professor of biology at the University of Queensland, Australia, who collected the sponge whose genome was sequenced from the Great Barrier Reef. (berkeley.edu)
A three-dimensional fragment of a spongin skeleton from a modern keratosan sponge, illustrating its branching and network of fibers. (livescience.com)
By then, other scientists had published descriptions of fossilized sponge skeletons that strengthened Turner's suspicions about her unusual discoveries. (livescience.com)
If you look at the body of a fossil sponge microscopically, it has this characteristic microstructure, which was described and characterized and fully affiliated with the spongin [a type of collagen protein] skeleton in modern keratose demosponges," Turner said. (livescience.com)

Minerals make up the skeletons, shells and hard parts of a lot of lifeforms. (smithsonianmag.com)

At the bottom stand the scientists who believe that the most evolved and complex streams of life activity like human behaviour and the mentation responsible for decision-making and belief are merely inconsequential by-products of chance events involving only the rudimentary laws which mediating simple electrical and chemical activity. (blogspot.com)
Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago. (uncommondescent.com)
The scientists who discovered it say the animal was a predator with sharp teeth, a crocodile-like head, and a body that grew up to 2.75 metres (9ft) long. (uncommondescent.com)
Scientists have previously been able to trace the transition of fish into limbed animals only crudely over the millions of years they anticipate the process took place. (uncommondescent.com)

Some species also bore a pair of rigid, curved spines (known as helens) that protruded from between the conical shell and operculum - structures with no equivalents in any other group of animals. (archaeology.wiki)
Even by ~700 million years ago, several species of these pioneering little skeleton-builders had evolved, suggesting that their strategy had been around for some time. (palaeontologyonline.com)
With modern species, researchers can study fluid flows around living animals. (salon.com)
11:33 that all mammals evolved from one species. (khanacademy.org)
So I begin with the Brighton deposit, where was found the skeleton of a small horse supposed, without successful contradiction, to be an ancestor of a species which Professor James Cossar Ewart has named the Pony Celticus, and which once overspread Western Europe. (pdfhost.io)
They lingered long in North Wales, that little nest of undisturbed peaks, and it was with the descendants of this species that the Romans mated their military animals and produced the packhorse so necessary in rugged West Britain. (pdfhost.io)
Just like all other anatomical features of our species, the masticatory system has also evolved during the history of evolution of man. (apospublications.com)

But the origin of skeletons has a much deeper root, in the Proterozoic eon (2,500 million years ago to 540 million years ago), and that is what I would like to explore here. (palaeontologyonline.com)
The oldest fossil skeletons found so far date back more than 700 million years. (palaeontologyonline.com)
It took another 150 million years for multicellular life to adopt skeleton-building, but when it did, the results were striking. (palaeontologyonline.com)
In other words, on the most generous timeframe we can give the evolutionists, 55 million years, the single Primate order took that amount of time to diversify to today's state in the Cenozoic as it took for over 24 disparate phyla to arise in the Cambrian. (creation.com)
So, what does attenuating the rise of so many different animal bodyplans from 5-15 million years to 25-55 million years do to this pattern? (creation.com)
Segmented worms and mollusks evolved in the ocean approximately 550 million years ago. (answersingenesis.org)
The weird fossil pictured here is a specimen of Ceratocystis - a member of an ancient group of animals, the Stylophora, that lived roughly 500 million to 300 million years ago. (nature.com)
Fish vertebrae Fish were the first animals to have vertebrae, about 510 million years ago. (quatr.us)
Studies suggest that the hands of chimpanzees have evolved more than the hands of humans in the last few million years. (animalresearch.info)
The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of nearly all animals on Earth today. (wisc.edu)
The flat-lying layered sedimentary rocks of the 525-million-year-old Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone rest on metamorphic rocks of the 1,740-million-year-old Vishnu Schist. (wisc.edu)

We know that many (if not all) animals living in shallow marine environments have evolved adaptations that allow them to interact with and manipulate currents, either to reduce drag and prevent them from being swept away (think limpets and barnacles), or to aid in feeding (think crinoids, sea anemones and gorgonian corals). (salon.com)
Isotelus rex lived in shallow tropical seas and fed on smaller animals such as shrimp and worms. (gatewaygazette.ca)
Occurring worldwide, the Great Unconformity juxtaposes old rocks, formed billions of years ago deep within the Earth's crust, with relatively young Cambrian sedimentary rock formed from deposits left by shallow ancient seas that covered the continents just a half billion years ago. (wisc.edu)
During the early Cambrian, shallow seas repeatedly advanced and retreated across the North American continent, gradually eroding away surface rock to uncover fresh basement rock from within the crust. (wisc.edu)
Tiktaalik - the name means "a large, shallow-water fish" in the Inuit language Inuktikuk - shows that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water. (uncommondescent.com)
Paleontologists continue to identify creatures that inhabited the waters of the "ancient" Cambrian ocean to be just like what we find in the shallow seas of the 21st century. (icr.org)

These skeletons were built by protists, single-celled eukaryotes (creatures from the same domain of life as us) - although nobody is yet sure why. (palaeontologyonline.com)
And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother's womb, and the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land. (chertluedde.com)

Wadi Al-Hitan tells the tale of land mammals evolving into large ocean mammals. (sciencenews.org)
Even the cetacean forelimbs have the same structure (because they evolved from land dwelling mammals), one big bone, two smaller bones, mass of bones, and five digits. (skepticink.com)
But among amniotic animals-reptiles, birds, and mammals-that's not even that weird. (animalresearch.info)
Mammals are members of a class of air-breathing vertebrate animals characterised by the possession of endothermy, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands functional in mothers with young. (absoluteastronomy.com)
One other vertebrate group evolved in the Triassic at about the same time as the dinosaurs: the mammals. (paleoportal.org)

New features arise along the evolving lineages, and diversification turns those features into synapomorphies of new clades while new apomorphies appear among the morphologically diverging branches. (creation.com)

The basement rocks were later covered with sedimentary deposits from those Cambrian seas, creating the boundary now recognized as the Great Unconformity. (wisc.edu)
Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land-living animal both in terms of its anatomy and its way of life," said Neil Shubin, a biologist at the University of Chicago, and a leader of the expedition which found Tiktaalik. (uncommondescent.com)

unicellular, animal-like protists , including amoebas , foraminiferans , actinopods , ciliates , flagellates , and apicomplexans ( Biology , 6th Ed., 2002). (emergentearth.com)

LIke other echinoderms they did possess a skeleton of calcite plates. (fossilera.com)

In the first place, similar gene sequences might have evolved independently on two parallel lines of descent starting with two different genes, as the hypothesis of convergent evolution asserts. (skepticink.com)

They evolved into all sorts of ecological niches and are a paradigm in miniature for evolution as a whole. (we-make-money-not-art.com)
Now, researchers from Stanford University may have uncovered an important piece of the Ediacaran-Cambrian puzzle which could help piece together the missing links of the evolution of all life on Earth. (earth.com)
So, in the absence of any useful theories as to how we evolved to where we are today, the position of most creationists is to dispute Darwin's theory of evolution. (suffolkhands.org.uk)
My main interest is in the evolution of this phylum of colonial animals and I undertake research on their taxonomy, biomineralogy and palaeoecology. (nhm.ac.uk)
Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action - like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds. (uncommondescent.com)
The stage was set for the evolution of oxygen-breathing animals. (apospublications.com)

Tiktaalik roseae looked like a cross between a primitive fish and a rudimentary four-legged animal known as a tetrapod. (gatewaygazette.ca)
Its fin contains bones that compare to the upper arm, forearm and primitive parts of the hand of land-living animals. (uncommondescent.com)

The only Ediacaran burrows are horizontal, on or just below the surface, and were made by animals which fed above the surface, but burrowed to hide from predators. (wikipedia.org)
The Ediacaran burrows found so far imply simple behaviour, and the complex, efficient feeding traces common from the start of the Cambrian are absent. (wikipedia.org)
Although the Ediacaran oceans had less oxygen and any animals that inhabited the deep ocean would have had to expend more energy to breathe, if temperatures were constant, it would have put less strain on the animals. (earth.com)

2001. An early Cambrian tunicate from China. (tripod.com)
Evidence of changes in the seawater chemistry is captured in the rock record by high rates of carbonate mineral formation early in the Cambrian, as well as the occurrence of extensive beds of glauconite, a potassium-, silica-, and iron-rich mineral that is much rarer today. (wisc.edu)

These tiny skeletons range from bottle-shaped structures to intricate scales with delicate spines and perforations, which probably coated the outside of a single-celled organism like a suit of chainmail. (palaeontologyonline.com)

Most of the phylum-level disparity appears very abruptly and almost entirely in the Cambrian. (creation.com)

More than half of these genes were found to code for proteins that are involved in regulating the physiology or development of the cardiovascular system, neural system and skeleton, with some thought to influence factors such as which vertebrae become elongated. (animalresearch.info)

Graptolithina is a class in the animal phylum Hemichordata, the members of which are known as Graptolites. (absoluteastronomy.com)
Brachiopods are a phylum of marine animals that have hard "valves" on the upper and lower surfaces, unlike the left and right arrangement in bivalve molluscs. (absoluteastronomy.com)
Sea urchins or urchins are small, spiny, globular animals which, with their close kin, such as sand dollars, constitute the class Echinoidea of the echinoderm phylum. (absoluteastronomy.com)
A chordate ( / ˈ k ɔːr d eɪ t / KOR -dayt ) is a deuterostomic animal belonging to the phylum Chordata ( / k ɔːr ˈ d eɪ t ə / kor- DAY -tə ). (findatwiki.com)

Gould (1989, 38) characterized this pattern as the 'cone of increasing diversity', but neither the fauna of the Cambrian nor the living marine fauna display this pattern. (creation.com)

Only one group of living animals - the brachiopods - has a comparable feeding structure enclosed by a pair of valves. (archaeology.wiki)

Not all skeletons are biomineralized (think of the exoskeletons of many insects, for example), but skeletons made of minerals are especially interesting for several reasons. (palaeontologyonline.com)

Once higher life evolved, the stromatolite-building microbial communities were often grazed away or outcompeted for space," said Suosaari. (smithsonianmag.com)
The researchers used what they knew of sea life and water temperatures today to help explain how life evolved in the harsh, cold, environment of the deep ocean millions of years ago. (earth.com)

Graptolites are fossil colonial animals known chiefly from the Upper Cambrian through the Lower Carboniferous. (absoluteastronomy.com)

The fossil is a triradial cone-like mound with four 37 cm long radial spicules, which has been considered as resembling the Cambrian demosponge genus Choia . (evolutionnews.org)

In one of the alternative hypotheses, stylophorans are held to be highly evolved echinoderms in which the stalk is a feeding arm, with a mouth somewhere in the middle linked to tube-feet that are covered by retractable plates. (nature.com)

Reference: "Ultrastructure reveals ancestral vertebrate pharyngeal skeleton in yunnanozoans" by Qingyi Tian, Fangchen Zhao, Han Zeng, Maoyan Zhu and Baoyu Jiang, 7 July 2022, Science . (scitechdaily.com)
The latter proposes that fins and girdles evolved from an ancestral gill arch. (bvsalud.org)

Like the Amazon basin today, it had a subtropical climate and the animal lived in small streams. (uncommondescent.com)

The interactions of these materials led to more complex biomolecules: proto RNA combined with enzyme, like basic materials, and evolved into ribozymes which had the ability to replicate themselves. (tintucplus.info)
That had been observed in more complex animals like fish and lobsters and crabs. (earth.com)

If, on the other hand, they diverged considerably before the Cambrian era (so as to allow for the divergence of various forms, then it is extraordinary that all the various lines should reach a fossilizable stage at much the same time. (allaboutscience.org)
In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. (chertluedde.com)
The embryonic development suggests that amniotic penises only evolved once, but that some animals have lost theirs over time. (animalresearch.info)

A basket-like pharyngeal skeleton is a feature found today in living jawless fishes, such as lampreys and hagfishes. (scitechdaily.com)

Some of the fossil animals appear similar to invertebrates alive today, while other are unique and are new to science. (worldbook.com)
Invertebrates, on the other hand, are animals without backbones. (scitechdaily.com)

The distinctive appearance and structure of the hyolith skeleton has obstructed previous attempts to classify these animals. (archaeology.wiki)

Anatomy66

Organisms30

Diseases21

Chemicals and Drugs54

Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment20

Psychiatry and Psychology1

Phenomena and Processes44

Disciplines and Occupations4

Anthropology, Education, Sociology and Social Phenomena10

Technology, Industry, Agriculture3

Humanities5

Information Science6

Named Groups1

Health Care1

Geographicals2

Explosion28

Fossils22

Organisms13

Common ancestor4

Precambrian1

Fossil record4

Sponges8

Vertebrates6

Biodiversity2

Calcium carbonate4

Evolutionary5

Burgess Shale2

Earliest4

Extinct3

Chordates2

Devonian1

Biomineralization2

Period10

Arthropods4

Sponge11

Shells1

Scientists4

Species7

Million11

Shallow6

Creatures2

Mammals5

Diversification1

Boundary2

Protists1

Calcite1

Independently1

Evolution6

Primitive2

Ediacaran3

Early2

Organism1

Abruptly1

Neural1

Phylum4

Fauna1

Brachiopods1

Insects1

Life evolved2

Carboniferous1

Genus1

Echinoderms1

Ancestral2

Streams1

Complex2

Time3

Lampreys1

Invertebrates2

Appearance1