Then, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, life opened its eyes. In the 15 million years that followed the evolution of vision, most of the major animal groups we know today appeared. After ...

“We can even calculate how many photons they would have captured.” Compound eyes evolved rapidly during the Cambrian period, more than 500 million years ago. A fossilized arthropod eye from ...

Biologists believe that eyes evolved independently on many, possibly hundreds, of occasions. And what a difference it made. In the sightless world of the Early Cambrian, vision was tantamount to a ...

Three of its weapons are visible in the fossil shown here: claws, propulsive swimming flaps, and at the base of the claws, eyes on eyestalks. The emergence of vision in the Cambrian helped both ...

All animal evolution for the last half billion years has come from tinkering with these Cambrian body plans. Then, between about 570 and 530 million years ago, another burst of diversification ...

The Cambrian fossil record indicates that most ... "Early vertebrates start to have big eyes and a series of muscle blocks ...

The Anomalocaris, a top Cambrian predator, is another highlight. The name means "unlike other shrimp" or "anomalous shrimp", which is a reference to the first fossil of the species found, which ...