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Cambrian Explosion
This nOde last updated December 1st, 2001 and is permanently morphing...
(9 Ik (Wind) / 0 Mak - 12.19.8.14.2)

Cambrian (kàm´brê-en) adjective
1.Of or relating to Wales; Welsh.
2.Of, relating to, or belonging to the geologic time, system of rocks, and sedimentary deposits of the first period of the Paleozoic Era, characterized by warm seas and desert land areas.

noun
1.A native of Wales; a Welshman.
2.The Cambrian Period.

[From Medieval Latin Cambria, Wales, alteration of Cumbria, from Welsh Cymry. Adj., sense 2, and n., sense 2, after Cambria.]

Cambrian Period

Cambrian Period, first division of the Paleozoic era of the geologic time scale, spanning an interval of about 70 million years, from 570 million to 500 million years ago. It was named in 1835 by English geologist Adam Sedgwick. The period was a time of steadily increasing oxygen content in the atmosphere and oceans, making possible life that could derive energy from respiration. Cambrian period seas teemed with marine invertebrate animal life, including sponges, worms, bryozoans, hydrozoans, brachiopods, mollusks, primitive arthropods such as the trilobite, and stalked echinoderms. Marine algae was the only plant life.

The Cambrian is the earliest geologic period for which science has sufficient evidence to hypothesize the existence and attributes of crustal plates. Collisions between these plates gave rise during this period to a vast landmass, or supercontinent, known as Gondwanaland, which incorporated the beginnings of South America, Africa, Antarctica, and Australia.

Another fundamental problem contradicts the theory of chance-driven natural selection. According to the theory, species should evolve slowly and gradually, since evolution is caused by the accumulation and selection of random errors in the genetic text. However, the fossil record reveals a completely different scenario. J. Madeleine Nash writes in her review of recent research in paleontology: "Until about 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled algae and single-celled plankton... Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within the span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialized with the suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched ou the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom... Since 1987, discoveries of major fossil beds in Greenland, in China, in Siberia, and now in Namibia have shown that the period of biological innovation occurred at virtually the same instant geological time all around the world... Now,... virtually everyone agrees that the Cambrian started almost exactly 543 million years ago and, even more startling, that all but one of the phyla in the fossil record appeared within the first 5 to 10 million years."

 - Jeremy Narby - _Cosmic Serpent: DNA And The Origins Of Knowledge_ p. 141

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