The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity

Key differences between editions

• The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity book examines our current understanding of early animal evolution from a variety of perspectives, including details of the fossil record, changes in geochemical cycles, the information revealed by the use of morphological and molecu- lar data to establish the evolutionary relationships among the major animal groups, and the startling new insights into the evolution of development pro- duced by comparative studies of modern animal groups.
• In the case of the Cambrian explosion, the great evolutionary puzzle is in establishing the relative importance of three pieces:
  1 -- changes in the environment, which were unusual by today’s standards;
  2 -- the appearance of developmental innovations that permitted the appearance of the progressively more complex animal body plans found through the Ediacaran and Early Cambrian;
  3 -- the construction of the ecological relationships that allowed these new animals to succeed.