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Learn about life through time... Cambrian

The Cambrian period (510-540 MYA) saw many peculiar new species evolve. These range from bizarre soft-bodied creatures through the first vertebrates to beautiful arthropods like trilobites.
 
Much of what we know about Cambrian life comes from fossils found in the Burgess Shale in Canada's rocky mountains. The flat, silvery rocks contain thin outlines and imprints of organisms long-extinct and extremely enigmatic.

Creatures like Hallucigenia, left, are baffling reminders of what nature can produce. The fossils show the imprint of a small tubular body with long protrusions along one side and shorter protrusions along the other side, with a bulbous "head" at one end. The protrusions are now thought to be spines and legs, meaning that Hallucigenia might have looked something like the picture.

Other oddities include the 2 foot long Anomalocaris - an extraordinary swimming jumble of suckers and stalks. It had a soft segmented body which decayed upon dying and scattered around the sea bed. This meant that the first Anomalocaris fossils were of small organs and mistaken for separate organisms.

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