Beautifully preserved organisms from the Lower Cambrian Maotianshan Shale in central Yunnan, southern China, document the sudden appearance of diverse metazoan body plans at phylum or subphylum levels, which were either short-lived or have continued to the present day. These 530 million year old fossil representatives of living animal groups provide us with unique insight into the foundations o...

The rapid appearance of bilaterian clades at the beginning of the Phanerozoic is one of the most intriguing topics in macroevolution. However, the complex feedbacks between diversification and ecological interactions are still poorly understood. Here, we show that a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the trace-fossil record of the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition indicates that body-plan div...

N o paleontological subject comes close to stimulating the public's interest like dinosaurs, but the origin of animals is probably a solid second. As is well known, representatives of nearly all of the animal phyla (e.g., arthropods, molluscs, echino-derms) appear at roughly the same moment in geologic time, the beginning of the Cambrian period, about 550 million years ago. Their sudden appeara...

The early–middle Cambrian (Fortunian to Age 4) is characterized by a significant increase in metazoan diversification. Furthermore, this interval is marked by a prominent environmental and ecological expansion of arthropodand echinoderm-rich biotas. Recent redox work has suggested that this shift occurred during stable or decreasing marine oxygen levels, suggesting that these paleobiological an...

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 ii...