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...

Valley-filling deposits of the Nama Group, southern Namibia, record two episodes of erosional downcutting and backfill, developed close together in time near the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary. Geochronological constraints indicate that the older valley fill began 539.4 ± 1 Ma or later; the younger of these deposits contains unusually well-preserved populations of the basal Cambrian trace fossil 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...

Contrasts between the Cambrian Explosion (CE) and the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE) have long been recognized. Whereas the vast majority of body plans were established as a result of the CE, taxonomic increases during the GOBE were manifested at lower taxonomic levels. Assessing changes of ichnodiversity and ichnodisparity as a result of these two evolutionary events may shed...

In the most complete and first radiometrically dated Precambrian-Cambrian transition strata along the Khorbusuonka River in northern Siberia, a succession of fossilized traces of activity of the earliest infaunal animals has been identified. As supplemented by a similar record in Podolia, the Ukraine and elsewhere. This collection demonstrates that thus far all of the structurally identifiable ...

Almost all of the modern animal phyla appear to originate in a relatively compressed interval of time known as the Cambrian Explosion. Although several factors have been identified that may have enabled the Cambrian Explosion, there remains the question of the final trigger. The development of cellular differentiation, the capacity of a cellular lineage to become specialized permanently in resp...

The discovery of fossilized brains and ventral nerve cords in lower and mid-Cambrian arthropods has led to crucial insights about the evolution of their central nervous system, the segmental identity of head appendages and the early evolution of eyes and their underlying visual systems. Fundamental ground patterns of lower Cambrian arthropod brains and nervous systems correspond to the ground p...

We report 87Sr/86Sr measurements on a suite of well preserved sedimentary carbonates from Lower Cambrian strata of the Lena River region of Siberia. Stable isotopes and major and trace element chemistry have been used to identify potentially unaltered samples for Sr isotopic measurements. The Sr data define a smooth curve of paleoseawater 87Sr/86Sr values from the Tommotian through to the early...

The evolutionary divergence of cnidarian and bilaterian lineages from their remote metazoan ancestor occurred at an unknown depth in time before the Cambrian, since crown group representatives of each are found in Lower Cambrian fossil assemblages. We report here a variety of putative embryonic, larval, and adult microfossils deriving from Precambrian phosphorite deposits of Southwest China, wh...