As alien as these creatures seem, they are also surprisingly ... It has long been suspected that the sparseness of the pre-Cambrian fossil record reflects these two problems.

The earliest known primitive chordate is Pikaia gracilens, a wormlike creature that swam in middle Cambrian seas. Fossils found in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia show traces of a notochord ...

High in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, the animals of an ancient ecosystem can be seen battling for life. The fossils of the Burgess Shale offer a glimpse at the incredible diversity of early life on ...

It's Pre-Cambrian - it's of an age that we now call ... to advanced segmentation," said Prof Xiao. In the past, the creatures that lived in the Ediacaran had been extremely difficult to classify.

They belonged to a now-extinct marine creature, Odaraia alata. The Burgess Shale was once part of the seafloor during the ...

Imagine traveling back in time to Earth roughly 500 million years ago, right in the middle of the Cambrian Explosion ... a vast array of the most unusual creatures imaginable.