What was the Cambrian Explosion?

The Cambrian Explosion has been called a major unsolved case in paleontology and geology, and it has plagued academia and other academics since Darwin. About 542 million years ago to 530 million years ago, it was considered to be the beginning of the Cambrian in geology, and Cambrian strata suddenly appeared in a large number of invertebrate fossils in more than 20 million years. In the earlier and more ancient strata, no obvious ancestral fossil phenomenon has been found for a long time. Paleontologists have called it the "Cambrian Outbreak of Life", or "Cambrian Outbreak" for short. This is also the beginning of Phanerozoic.

Cambrian life explosion

The origin of the Cambrian life explosion

The Cambrian outbreak attracted countless paleontologists and

An international team led by the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published the latest results of the Cambrian outbreak research in the internationally renowned geological journal "Geology". Based on the stratigraphic and paleontological fossil data obtained in Far Eastern Siberia, Russia, they proved that the typical Cambrian animal fossils had already appeared in the late Pre-Cambrian, and were mixed with the weakly mineralized animal fossils typical in the late Pre-Cambrian This shows that there is a gradual transition between the Cambrian biota and the late Precambrian Ediacaran biota.

This new research result breaks the existing understanding of the Cambrian outbreak. The Cambrian outbreak did not occur suddenly in the early Cambrian, but started at the end of the Precambrian.

It is known that the life of the earth has an evolution history of about 3.8 billion years or even earlier, but why we are familiar with complex life (multicellular animals) that can move and prey like human beings until 540 million years ago Began to appear explosively on Earth ("Cambrian Outbreak")? This is a major scientific riddle that has plagued the scientific community since the advent of Darwin's evolutionary masterpiece, Origin of Species, in 1859.

In the past 30 years, global scientists including China have made a series of major scientific discoveries in the field of animal origin and Cambrian outbreaks, and have made important contributions to solving this scientific problem. For example, in the early Cambrian Chengjiang fauna of Yunnan, China (520 million years ago), almost all known modern animal phyla fossils, including primitive vertebrates, were found, and earlier than the Chengjiang fauna, Animal fossils with various bones and mineralized shells. These early Cambrian fossil discoveries further confirmed the true existence of the Cambrian outbreak of animals, and increased the suddenness of the Cambrian outbreak.

Revealing the evolutionary history of animals before the Cambrian outbreak is the fundamental way to solve the mystery of the Cambrian outbreak. In recent decades, a large number of fossils with seemingly complex shapes and animal characteristics have been found in the strata before the Cambrian. For example, the typical Ediacara biota found around the world in the late Precambrian, the Lantian biota in southern Anhui, and the Lu'an biota in Guizhou, and so on. However, these fossils are very different from Cambrian animal fossils, and it is generally believed that there is no evolutionary relationship.

According to the fossil data found so far, the basic consensus of the academic community is that a global biological extinction event occurred at the end of the Pre-Cambrian. Match in time. Therefore, this biological extinction event is considered to be caused by abnormal changes in the earth's environment, and this recognition also supports the suddenness of the Cambrian outbreak, making the mystery of the Cambrian outbreak even more confusing. ^[3]