See beautiful fossils from top Cambrian sites around the world
You’ve heard of the Burgess Shale, but what about Sirius Passet?
For most of the nearly 3.5 billion years of documented life on Earth, creatures were simple, dominated by organisms such as bacteria, algae and fungi (SN: 10/13/18, p. 10).
Then, beginning about 541 million years ago, life quickly diversified into an array of new, complex forms. This flourishing, called the Cambrian explosion, took place within about 25 million years. Fossils from the period have been preserved in rocks at more than 50 known sites worldwide, the most famous of which is Canada’s Burgess Shale, discovered in 1909.