“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

As a result, the Cambrian seas were the birthplace of the first mouths, eyes and legs. Some of the odd critters living in these ancient seas included Opabinia, which had five eyes and an elephant ...

The Cambrian explosion refers to a period of rapid evolution some 500 million years ago. Diversity flourished and animals emerged with features such as compound eyes, gills, and teeth. Changes in ...