Sirius Passet, Greenland and the Cambrian Explosion

Throughout Earth history there have been many important milestones: e.g. the emergence of life, the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere, snowball Earth events. One of these major events was the emergence of multicellular life, which, as we are all told in Palaeontology lectures, took place in the Cambr...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geology Today
Main Author: Brooks, Kent
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2451.2012.00842.x
https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1365-2451.2012.00842.x
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1365-2451.2012.00842.x
Description
Summary:Throughout Earth history there have been many important milestones: e.g. the emergence of life, the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere, snowball Earth events. One of these major events was the emergence of multicellular life, which, as we are all told in Palaeontology lectures, took place in the Cambrian, when a sudden flowering of life forms emerged, including all of the major groups we have today: the ‘Cambrian explosion’. Two great questions emerge: what happened before this (a problem which worried Darwin as it seemed to threaten his thesis of steady evolution) and how, in detail did this ‘explosion’ take place?