A predator of the Cambrian was the giant, shrimplike Anomalocaris, which trapped its prey in fearsome mouthparts lined with hooks. Even stranger was the five-eyed Opabinia, which caught its ...

L ife was already billions of years old before the Cambrian explosion that occurred roughly 540 million years or so ago. For all the time prior to this unprecedented surge in diversity and ...

As a result, the Cambrian seas were the birthplace of the first mouths, eyes and legs. Some of the odd critters living in these ancient seas included Opabinia, which had five eyes and an elephant ...

All animal evolution for the last half billion years has come from tinkering with these Cambrian body plans. Then, between about 570 and 530 million years ago, another burst of diversification ...