Great Cambrian Fossils

[BillTre]

Here are some great pictures and an open access article from Quanta magazine of Cambrian fossils (like Burgess Shale) from Southern China.

Example:

 

[sbrothy]

Here are some great pictures and an open access article from Quanta magazine of Cambrian fossils (like Burgess Shale) from Southern China.

Example:
View attachment 371362

Wow. Nice and thought-provoking pictures. I'd imagine a lot of fossils following the Cambrian Explosion. Embarrassingly I don't know enough to tell with any confidence if Cambrian fossils mean they were "made" during the actual Cambrian epoch. I'd guess so but honestly I don't know. Must be a lot left from that particular epoch I'd imagine though.

 

[BillTre]

Yes, those were fossils from the Cambrian period (period named after where the fossils from that time were first found).
PreCambrian fossils were even simpler (such as lacking appendages and a large variety of tissue types).

The significance of this period is that these are the first known examples of animal body plans. Since the first animal body plans were being evolved then, many were weird looking to us today and are considered evolution experiments. Many current body plans evolved from these.
Many are soft body fossils which are rare because they have to be rapidly buried before they are eaten or destroyed by the environment. The Burgess shale fossils (a different Cambrian fossil site) are thought to be the result of repeated rapid burials by fine grained underwater landslides from a neighboring slope. These unlikely to happen events combined with the age of the rocks, make these fossils very rare.