There are “some beautiful specimens, including some surprising discoveries.” “It is wonderful,” says Douglas Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work. There have been few clues about what happened in between, but fossils from 462 million years ago recently discovered in a quarry in central Wales are filling in that gap, researchers report today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. But by 400 million years ago, almost all of those species disappeared, eventually replaced by the ancestors of most modern animals.
Between 540 million and 485 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, so many new, complex animal life forms arose that paleontologists speak of the Cambrian Explosion or the Biological Big Bang.
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