A dramatic shift in microbial reefs occurred around the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary. Here we describe changes composition, construction, and texture of Zavkhan Terrane Gobi-Altai Province, western Mongolia, during late Ediacaran early Cambrian. Stromatolites consisting peloids, micritic clots, homogeneous lime mud without calcified microbes (calcimicrobes) are characteristic upper (units 9 16A ...

The Cambrian explosion is a grand challenge to science today and involves multidisciplinary study. This event is generally believed as a result of genetic innovations, environmental factors and ecological interactions, even though there are many conflicts on nature and timing of metazoan origins. The crux of the matter is that an entire roadmap of the evolution is missing to discern the biologi...

a r t i c l e i n f o The Early–Middle Cambrian Pioche Shale of Lincoln County, Nevada preserves a diverse array of soft-bodied ecdysozoans that are well-known from the Burgess Shale soft-bodied fauna of British Columbia, Canada. At Pioche certain genera occur both above and below the Middle Cambrian boundary, allowing a comparison of the nature of their preservation across this interval. In or...

The oldest annelid fossils are polychaetes from the Cambrian Period. They are representatives of the annelid stem group and thus vital in any discussion of how we polarize the evolution of the crown group. Here, we describe a fossil polychaete from the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fauna, Pygocirrus butyricampum gen. et sp. nov., with structures identified as pygidial cirri, which are recorded f...

Whilst the "Cambrian Explosion" continues to attract much attention from a wide range of earth and life scientists, the detailed patterns exhibited by the terminal Proterozoic-Early Cambrian biotas remain unclear, for reasons of systematics, biostratigraphy and biogeography. In particular, recent changes in absolute dating of the Cambrian have refined the period of time that the fossil record m...

The case study presented here deals with the Pb-Zn-Cu skarn ores hosted in Rosas Shear Zone (RSZ), a highly strained domain located external zone of Sardinian Variscan chain. RSZ is characterized by several tectonic slices Cambrian limestones within strongly folded and foliated Cambrian-Ordovician siliciclastic succession, intruded late granites mafic dykes. Based on geological mapping, structu...

Siliciclastic rocks of the upper Byrd Group in the Transantarctic Mountains record rapid denudation and molasse deposition during Ross orogenesis along the early Paleozoic convergent margin of Gondwana. These rocks, which stratigraphically overlie Lower Cambrian Byrd carbonate deposits, are dominated by fresh detritus from proximal igneous and metamorphic sources within the Ross Orogen. Biostra...