Cnidarians represent an early diverging animal group and thus insight into their origin and diversification is key to understanding metazoan evolution. Further, cnidarian jellyfish comprise an important component of modern marine planktonic ecosystems. Here we report on exceptionally preserved cnidarian jellyfish fossils from the Middle Cambrian (approximately 505 million years old) Marjum Form...

This paper completes the project of constructing combinatorial models (called frameworks) for the exchange graph and g-vector fan associated to any exchange matrix B whose Cartan companion is of finite or affine type, using the combinatorics and geometry of Coxeter-sortable elements and Cambrian lattices/fans. Specifically, we construct a framework in the unique non-acyclic affine case, the cyc...

The early Cambrian Guanshan biota of eastern Yunnan, China, contains exceptionally preserved animals and algae. Most diverse and abundant are the arthropods, of which there are at least 11 species of trilobites represented by numerous specimens. Many trilobite specimens show soft-body preservation via iron oxide pseudomorphs of pyrite replacement. Here we describe digestive structures from two ...

Conulariids are unusual extinct metazoans most often considered to be a group of scyphozoan cnidarians or close relatives. Generally, the temporal range of conulariid fossils is perceived to be late Precambrian or Cambrian to Triassic, though a supposed Cretaceous conulariid from Peru was published 46 years ago. A re-evaluation of this fossil indicates it is not a conulariid, but instead a pinn...

The Steptoean Positive Carbon Isotope Excursion (SPICE) event at ca. 497−494 Ma was a major carbon-cycle perturbation of the late Cambrian that coincided with rapid diversity changes among trilobites. Several scenarios (e.g., climatic/oceanic cooling and seawater anoxia) have been proposed to account for an extinction trilobites onset SPICE, but exact mechanism remains unclear. Here, we present...

Here we report exceptionally preserved non-biomineralized compound eyes of a non-trilobite arthropod Cindarella eucalla from the lower Cambrian Chengjiang Lagerstätte, China. The specimen represents the oldest microanatomical evidence confirming the occurrence of highly developed vision in the early Cambrian, over 2,000 ommatidia in each eye. Moreover, a quantitative analysis of the distributio...

Tlusty’s topological analysis of the genetic code suggests ecosystem changes in available metabolic free energy that predated the aerobic transition enabled a punctuated sequence of increasingly complex genetic codes and protein translators. These coevolved via a ‘Cambrian explosion’ until, very early on, the ancestor of the present narrow spectrum of protein machineries became evolutionarily l...