The rapid diversification of multicellular animal life that took place around the beginning of the Cambrian Period. It resulted in the appearance of almost all modern animal phyla.
See Note at Burgess Shale
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The Ediacaran period occurred before the Cambrian explosion, a major evolutionary turning point when rising oxygen levels helped complex organisms diversify rapidly across Earth's oceans.
From Science Daily ● May 12, 2026
Then came the Cambrian explosion, known as evolution's "big bang", roughly 540 million years ago.
From Barron's ● Jan. 28, 2026
“Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase,” Altman wrote, calling this genre of engagement “interactive fan fiction.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 26, 2025
The species was probably not the ecdysozoans’ common ancestor, the authors say, but the discovery adds to the diversity of life before the Cambrian explosion.
From Science Magazine ● Nov. 20, 2024
Before the Cambrian explosion species seem to have succeeded one another rather slowly.
From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
It shows that important elements of their body plan were already established shortly after the Cambrian Explosion, a time when life was rapidly diversifying.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 3, 2026
During the Cambrian Explosion more than 500 million years ago, these weird worms — which lived inside long, cone-shaped tubes — were some of the most common predators on the seafloor.
From New York Times ● Mar. 26, 2024
In Wales, paleontologists have uncovered a rich source of 462-million-year-old fossils that reveal more overlap than expected between animals that evolved during the Cambrian Explosion 40 million years earlier and the ancestors of modern species.
From Science Magazine ● May 3, 2023
The Cambrian Explosion came after a mass extinction, right?
From Salon ● Dec. 19, 2022
After the Cambrian Explosion, a similar event occurred which abandoned some of the Cambrian evolutionary animal lines and proliferated others.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2017
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
