Abstract
Book details The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, by Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine. Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts & Co. 2013. Pp ix + 406. H/b $60.00, ISBN 978-1-936211-03-5. When writing The Origin of Species, Darwin (1859, pp. 306-309) puzzled over the abrupt beginning of life’s fossil record: after long, seemingly lifeless eras, an extraordinary diversity of marine life suddenly burst forth into the geological record. Nowadays, the trained minds of geologists and microbial biochemists see abundant evidence of microbial activity in these seemingly lifeless pre-Cambrian rocks: indeed, these microbes’ photosynthesis and chemosynthesis transformed the chemistry of the oceans and the geology of their sediments (Fischer 1984, Konhauser 2007). Since Darwin’s time, a pre-Cambrian biota of macroscopic multicellular organisms, the Ediacaran biota, has been discovered, although just what these organisms were, or even whether they were all aquatic, is far from settled (Knauth 2013, Retallack 2013, Xiao 2013). It remains true that the first organisms we can recognize as members of living phyla burst into the fossil record, in remarkable diversity, with disconcerting suddenness, in the Cambrian period, beginning 540 million years ago. What happened? In The Cambrian Explosion, two paleontologists, Douglas Erwin and his former dissertation advisor James Valentine, document the explosion of diversity in the Cambrian, and the events leading up to it, in lavishly illustrated detail. This story begins with the origin about two billion years ago — by an Archaean incorporating bacterial symbionts capable of aerobic respiration — of
Highlights
Book details The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, by Douglas H
The exquisitely fossilized remains of complex ecosystems appear — first Chengjiang in China, Sirius Passet in north Greenland and the Emu Bay shales in Australia 520-515 million years ago, ~ 10 million years later, the Burgess Shales of the Canadian Rockies (p. 155), made famous by Gould (1989) and Conway Morris (1998)
The Cambrian brought forth a huge diversity of forms, many destined to disappear as natural selection sifted the more from the less enduringly effective
Summary
Book details The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, by Douglas H. It remains true that the first organisms we can recognize as members of living phyla burst into the fossil record, in remarkable diversity, with disconcerting suddenness, in the Cambrian period, beginning 540 million years ago. Metazoans — including sponges — clearly evolved before the Ediacaran began.
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