The Cambrian

An explosion of life

The Cambrian was, compared to the Precambrian, a relatively short geological period of about 50 million years, lasting from 543 million years to about 490 million years.

The Cambrian is best known for the so-called Cambrian Explosion, named after the first major evolutionary chain reaction. Many predators of this time began to develop compound eyes and significantly improved visual organs.

As a result, prey was also forced to evolve and biologically upgrade. Many new life forms emerged, including Haikouichthys. The ability to see may seem self-evident to us today, but in the Cambrian, it triggered an evolutionary explosion. 

During the Cambrian, life on Earth took place mainly in the shallow seas at the edges of the continents, because on land it was still very uncomfortable to live and not a lot of life forms were able to survive. Occasionally, gigantic underwater landslides ensured that even the most fragile molluscs were preserved as fossils. Therefore, today we know quite precisely what our world looked like in the Cambrian.