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At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record
The certain fossil record of animals begins around 540 million years ago, close to the base of the Cambrian Period. A series of extraordinary discoveries starting over 100 years ago with Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale has accelerated in the last thirty years or so with the description of e...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Bentham Science Publishers
2013
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3861885/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24396267 http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/13892029113149990011 |
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author | Budd, Graham E |
author_facet | Budd, Graham E |
author_sort | Budd, Graham E |
collection | PubMed |
description | The certain fossil record of animals begins around 540 million years ago, close to the base of the Cambrian Period. A series of extraordinary discoveries starting over 100 years ago with Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale has accelerated in the last thirty years or so with the description of exceptionally-preserved Cambrian fossils from around the world. Such deposits of “Burgess Shale Type” have been recently complemented by other types of exceptional preservation. Together with a remarkable growth in knowledge about the environments that these early animals lived in, these discoveries have long exerted a fascination and strong influence on views on the origins of animals, and indeed, the nature of evolution itself. Attention is now shifting to the period of time just before animals become common, at the base of the Cambrian and in the preceding Ediacaran Period. Remarkable though the Burgess Shale deposits have been, a substantial gap still exists in our knowledge of the earliest animals. Nevertheless, the fossils from this most remarkable period of evolutionary history continue to exert a strong influence on many aspects of animal evolution, not least recent theories about developmental evolution. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3861885 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2013 |
publisher | Bentham Science Publishers |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-38618852014-03-01 At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record Budd, Graham E Curr Genomics Article The certain fossil record of animals begins around 540 million years ago, close to the base of the Cambrian Period. A series of extraordinary discoveries starting over 100 years ago with Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale has accelerated in the last thirty years or so with the description of exceptionally-preserved Cambrian fossils from around the world. Such deposits of “Burgess Shale Type” have been recently complemented by other types of exceptional preservation. Together with a remarkable growth in knowledge about the environments that these early animals lived in, these discoveries have long exerted a fascination and strong influence on views on the origins of animals, and indeed, the nature of evolution itself. Attention is now shifting to the period of time just before animals become common, at the base of the Cambrian and in the preceding Ediacaran Period. Remarkable though the Burgess Shale deposits have been, a substantial gap still exists in our knowledge of the earliest animals. Nevertheless, the fossils from this most remarkable period of evolutionary history continue to exert a strong influence on many aspects of animal evolution, not least recent theories about developmental evolution. Bentham Science Publishers 2013-09 2013-09 /pmc/articles/PMC3861885/ /pubmed/24396267 http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/13892029113149990011 Text en ©2013 Bentham Science Publishers http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/), which permits unrestrictive use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Article Budd, Graham E At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record |
title | At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record |
title_full | At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record |
title_fullStr | At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record |
title_full_unstemmed | At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record |
title_short | At the Origin of Animals: The Revolutionary Cambrian Fossil Record |
title_sort | at the origin of animals: the revolutionary cambrian fossil record |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3861885/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24396267 http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/13892029113149990011 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT buddgrahame attheoriginofanimalstherevolutionarycambrianfossilrecord |