A new species of the Early to Middle Cambrian pelecypod genus Pojetaia is reported from early Moroccan Anti-Atlas with sarhroensis . Arhouriella opheodontoides n. gen. and sp. first report a an amphidetic, slightly twisted partly internal ligament appears represent second order pelecypods in Cambrian. Preservation, environment correlation are discussed. Species discussed detail. Jellia shown be...

Harry Whittington's 1975 monograph on Opabinia was the first to highlight how some of the Burgess Shale animals differ markedly from those that populate today's oceans. Categorized by Stephen J. Gould as a 'weird wonder' (Wonderful life, 1989) Opabinia, together with other unusual Burgess Shale fossils, stimulated ongoing debates about the early evolution of the major animal groups and the natu...

Present-day ecosystems host a huge variety of organisms that interact and transfer mass and energy via a cascade of trophic levels. When and how this complex machinery was established remains largely unknown. Although exceptionally preserved biotas clearly show that Early Cambrian animals had already acquired functionalities that enabled them to exploit a wide range of food resources, there is ...

Extant panarthropods (euarthropods, onychophorans and tardigrades) are hallmarked by stunning morphological and taxonomic diversity, but their central nervous systems (CNS) are relatively conserved. The timing of divergences of the ground pattern CNS organization of the major panarthropod clades has been poorly constrained because of a scarcity of data from their early fossil record. Although t...

The Cambrian explosion is named for the geologically sudden appearance of numerous metazoan body plans (many of living phyla) between about 530 and 520 million years ago, only 1.7% of the duration of the fossil record of animals. Earlier indications of metazoans are found in the Neoproterozic; minute trails suggesting bilaterian activity date from about 600 million years ago. Larger and more el...

Most fossils from the Pre-Cambrian that were claimed to perhaps be fungal have proved to be artefacts or otherwise dubious (Hawksworth 2015, Taylor et al. 2015). Some more convincing remains of mycelium-like structures have, however, now been reported from a 2.4 billion-year-old basalt from the Palaeoproterozoic of the Pre-Cambrian in South Africa (Bengston et al. 2017). The basalts were submar...