—Burgess Shale-type fossil assemblages provide a unique record of animal life in the immediate aftermath of the so-called “Cambrian explosion.” While most soft-bodied faunas in the rock record were conserved by mineral replication of soft tissues, Burgess Shale-type preservation involved the conservation of whole assemblages of soft-bodied animals as primary carbonaceous remains, often preserve...

Saraikistan (South Punjab and surrounding) area of Pakistan is located in the central Pakistan. This represents Triassic-Jurassic to Recent sedimentary marine terrestrial strata. Most Mesozoic Early Cenozoic are represented by strata with rare deposits, while Late continental fluvial deposits. hosts significant mineral deposits their development can play a role region ultimately for The data re...

as Mollusca (Coleoidea) and precursors of Cambrian Nectocaridids and extant cuttlefish and squid. Abstract A functional interpretation of the problematic Ediacaran fossils Podolimurus and similar organisms such as Dickinsonia indicates that they are hitherto unrecognized members of Mollusca: Coleoidea and precursors of Cambrian Nectocaridids and of extant cuttlefish and squid. This interpretati...

The fossil record of the Cambrian Period has been known as a problem for evolutionary thegfory since Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin was aware of the sudden appearance of complex animal forms in the Cambrian from his own collecting in northeastern Wales. Complex animal forms such as trilobites seemed to appear with geological suddenness with no apparent ancestors in older rocks below...

The Truong Son orogenic belt (TSOB) is one of the most important belts in Indochina block. There are numerous mafic to felsic intrusions Early Paleozoic caused by Tethyan orogeny. However, tectono-magmatic evolution TSOB still unclear. In this paper, zircon U-Pb dating, whole-rock geochemistry, and Sr-Nd isotopic data magmatic rocks have been systematically investigated explore petrogenesis tec...

The controversy about a Cambrian "explosion" of morphological disparity (followed by decimation), cladogenesis and fossilization is of central importance for the history of life. This paper revisits the controversy (with emphasis in onychophorans, which include emblematic organisms such as Hallucigenia), presents new data about the Chengjiang (Cambrian of China) faunal community and compares it...

One of the most interesting challenges facing paleobiologists is explaining the Cambrian explosion, the dramatic appearance of most metazoan animal phyla in the Early Cambrian, and the subsequent stability of these body plans over the ensuing 530 million years. We propose that because phenotypic variation decreases through geologic time, because microRNAs (miRNAs) increase genic precision, by t...

The Cambrian 'explosion' is widely regarded as one of the fulcrum points in the history of life, yet its origins and causes remain deeply controversial. New data from the fossil record, especially of Burgess Shale-type Lagerstätten, indicate, however, that the assembly of bodyplans is not only largely a Cambrian phenomenon, but can already be documented in fair detail. This speaks against a muc...

Xandarellida is a well-defined clade of Lower Palaeozoic non-biomineralized artiopodans that is exclusively known from the early Cambrian (Stage 3) Chengjiang biota of South China. Here we describe a new member of this group, Xandarella mauretanica sp. nov., from the middle Cambrian (Stage 5) Tatelt Formation of Morocco, making this the first non-trilobite Cambrian euarthropod known from North ...

The emergence of complex patterns of organization close to the Cambrian boundary is known to have happened over a (geologically) short period of time. It involved the rapid diversification of body plans and stands as one of the major transitions in evolution. How it took place is a controversial issue. Here we explore this problem by considering a simple model of pattern formation in multicellu...