- NEWS FEATURE
Early fossils with guts, segmented bodies and other sophisticated features reveal a revolution in animal life — before the Cambrian explosion.
Organisms named Fractofusus cover the sea floor some 560 million years ago, in a reconstruction of fossils from Newfoundland, Canada. Credit: Dr Charlotte G. Kenchington
Listen to an audio version of this story
Nature 586, 662-665 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02985-z
References
Chen, Z., Zhou, C., Yuan, X. & Xiao, S. Nature 573, 412–415 (2019).
Chen, Z., Chen, X., Zhou, C., Yuan, X. & Xiao, S. Sci. Adv. 4, eaao6691 (2018).
Ford, T. D. Proc. Yorks. Geol. Soc. 31, 211–217 (1958).
Seilacher, A. Lethaia 22, 229–239 (1989).
Seilacher, A. J. Geol. Soc. 149, 607–613 (1992).
Bobrovskiy, I. et al. Science 361, 1246–1249 (2018).
Evans, S. D., Hughes, I. V., Gehling, J. G. & Droser, M. L. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 117, 7845–7850 (2020).
Schiffbauer, J. D. et al. Nature Commun. 11, 205 (2020).
Dunn, F. S., Liu, A. G. & Donoghue, P. C. J. Biol. Rev. Camb. Phil. Soc. 93, 914–932 (2018).
Mitchell, E. G., Kenchington, C. G., Liu, A. G., Matthews, J. J. & Butterfield, N. J. Nature 524, 343–360 (2015).
Liu, A. G. & Dunn, F. S. Curr. Biol. 30, 1322–1328 (2020).
Zhu, M., Zhuravlev, A. Yu., Wood, R. A., Zhao, F. & Sukhov, S. S. Geology 45, 459–462 (2017).
Wood, R. et al. Nature Ecol. Evol. 3, 528–538 (2019).
What sparked the Cambrian explosion?
Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life
Big data renews fight over animal origins
Earliest skeletal animals were reef builders
How the earliest mammals thrived alongside dinosaurs