Precambrian time covers the vast bulk of the Earth's history, starting with the planet's creation about 4.5 billion years ago and ending with the emergence of complex, multicelled life-forms ...

The Precambrian eon is vast, almost unimaginably so. In fact, before some fossil discoveries were made late in the 20th century, it was considered unknowable -- evolution's dark ages. The ...

How can the soft bodies of coleoid cephalopods so aptly hide in their environment? Why must they? What cells and specialized organs make such crypsis possible for one of the older evolutionary ...

How will we ever know? Photographed at Florida Keys Marine Life Just as humans are mammals, octopuses are cephalopods. The word is Greek for “head-foot” and refers to their weird anatomy ...

Octopuses and fish are routinely seen working together on the ocean floor, and now scientists say that the cephalopods are the leaders of the pack. By Elizabeth Preston Elizabeth Preston wrote ...

But did you know that each arm contains its own 'mini brain'? Jon Ablett, curator of the Museum's cephalopod collection (including octopuses), tells us more: This arrangement enables octopuses to ...

Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we have evaluated the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid ...

Octopuses - and other invertebrate cephalopods - are considered as sentient beings, but EU law covering farm animal welfare is only applied to vertebrates - creatures that have backbones.

Ammonites were shelled cephalopods that died out about 66 million years ago. Fossils of them are found all around the world, sometimes in very large concentrations. The often tightly wound shells of ...

A probable crater stretching more than 370 miles, or 600 kilometers, across the heart of Australia could reshape our understanding of Earth's geological history. Researcher Daniel Connelly and ...

Journal of Geophysical Research 71, 3369–3378 (1966). Evans, D. A. A fundamental Precambrian–Phanerozoic shift in Earth’s glacial style? Tectonophysics 375, 353–385 (2003). Evans ...

From the 600 trillion tons of iron ore present today, we know there was plenty of iron in Precambrian waters. Iron normally stays dissolved in seawater; it falls out of solution when it comes in ...