Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The Cambrian Induration (Hardening)

` I find this scientific discovery heads-up by Monado to be quite intriguing! In fact, she's recently cited an article in my blog, and, well, now I'm doing the same....
` Basically, it says of the oldest-known chordate fossil;

It is part of a growing body of evidence that body plans diversified during the Pre-Cambrian, but organisms were soft and were rarely preserved as fossils. The Cambrian explosion is more a result of developing hard body parts than any actual increase in the rate of evolution.

` Her post can be found here... and in case you miss reading ultra-long science posts, the article she referenced is here on a certain blog called The Panda's Thumb.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So it only looks like a bunch of different kinds of things evolved suddenly. But they didn't - their ancestors are just hard to find because they mostly rotted away completely.

Interesting!

Spoony Quine said...

` Yep, as far as anyone can tell, nothing particularly explosive was happening.