Cambrian Ocean World

A comprehensive guide to the evolution of life during the Cambrian Period, and a story of one man’s search for the world’s oldest animal fossils.

“Told with a wry humor, the odd pop cultural/sci-fi reference, and personal anecdotes, Foster does a great job in making this an enjoyable read and bringing the Cambrian to us. An alien world is transformed before our eyes into one that is increasingly more familiar.” —Quarterly Review of Biology

This volume, aimed at the general reader, presents the life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than five hundred million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth’s history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than two million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies. Grazing, predation, and multi-tiered ecosystems with animals living in, on, or above the sea floor became common. The cascade of interaction led to an ever-increasing diversification of animal body types. By the end of the period, the ancestors of sponges, corals, jellyfish, worms, mollusks, brachiopods, arthropods, echinoderms, and vertebrates were all in place. The evidence of this Cambrian “explosion” is preserved in rocks all over the world, including North America, where the seemingly strange animals of the period are preserved in exquisite detail in deposits such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Cambrian Ocean World tells the story of what is, for us, the most important period in our planet’s long history.

“Definitely the best introductory textbook within its field. It is clearly worth reading.” —Deposits Magazine