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The Cambrian explosion was a period of rapid multicellular growth. Most animal life during the Cambrian was aquatic. Trilobites were once assumed to be the dominant life form at that time, [57] but this has proven to be incorrect. Arthropods were by far the most dominant animals in the ocean, but trilobites were only a minor part of the total ...
Continent Formed from a series of cratons during the development of Columbia - independent from about 1500 Ma, following break-up of Columbia - part of Rodinia from 1000 Ma [2] Avalonia: Cambrian Continent Rifted off northern Gondwana in the Cambrian, eventually colliding with Laurentia and Baltica in the Caledonian Orogeny to form Laurussia ...
In the Cambrian, there was a warmer and milder climate because most continental crust was closer to the equator and not the poles. [9] The continent endured an ice age during the Ordovician period and deglaciation was still occurring during the Silurian period.
The Cambrian is a major division of the geologic timescale that begins about 538.8 ± 0.2 Ma. [40] Cambrian continents are thought to have resulted from the breakup of a Neoproterozoic supercontinent called Pannotia. The waters of the Cambrian period appear to have been widespread and shallow. Continental drift rates may have been anomalously high.
The Cambrian spanned from 539–485 million years ago and is the first period of the Paleozoic Era of the Phanerozoic. The Cambrian marked a boom in evolution in an event known as the Cambrian explosion in which the largest number of creatures evolved in any single period of the history of the Earth.
The long-running puzzlement about the seemingly-sudden appearance of the Cambrian fauna without evident precursor(s) centers on three key points: whether there really was a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short period during the early Cambrian, what might have caused such rapid change, and what it would imply about ...
During this interval, the Cambrian explosion occurred. Laurentia was docked against the western shores of a united Gondwana for a brief period near the Precambrian and Cambrian boundary, forming the short-lived and still disputed supercontinent Pannotia. [13]
The extreme cooling of the global climate around 717–635 Ma (the so-called Snowball Earth of the Cryogenian period) and the rapid evolution of primitive life during the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian periods are thought to have been triggered by the breaking up of Rodinia or to a slowing down of tectonic processes. [8]