{"id":121842,"date":"2021-04-22T23:25:25","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T06:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/some-of-earths-first-animals-including-a-mysterious-alien-looking-creature-are-spilling-out-of-canadian-rocks"},"modified":"2021-04-22T23:25:25","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T06:25:25","slug":"some-of-earths-first-animals-including-a-mysterious-alien-looking-creature-are-spilling-out-of-canadian-rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/some-of-earths-first-animals-including-a-mysterious-alien-looking-creature-are-spilling-out-of-canadian-rocks","title":{"rendered":"Some of Earth\u2019s first animals\u2014including a mysterious, alien-looking creature\u2014are spilling out of Canadian rocks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/some-of-earths-first-animals-including-a-mysterious-alien-looking-creature-are-spilling-out-of-canadian-rocks2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Circa 2018<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>\n<strong>KOOTENAY NATIONAL PARK IN CANADA\u2014 <\/strong>The drumming of the jackhammer deepens. Then, a block of shale butterflies open, exposing to crisp mountain air a surface that hasn\u2019t seen sunlight in half a billion years. \u201cWoo!\u201d says paleontologist C\u00e9dric Aria of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, bracing the top slab of rock upright.<\/p>\n<p>Its underside bears charcoal-colored smudges that look vaguely like horseshoe crabs or the Millennium Falcon from <em>Star Wars<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s a spaceship landing area here,\u201d says expedition leader Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada.<\/p>\n<p>Those \u201cspaceships\u201d are carapaces, molted onto a long-vanished ocean floor by a species new to science. This field season they\u2019ve been spilling out of the rocks here, where Caron\u2019s team has spent the past few years unearthing groundbreaking animal fossils from the Cambrian period, the coming-out party for animal life on Earth. During the Cambrian, which began about 540 million years ago, nearly all modern animal groups\u2014as diverse as mollusks and chordates\u2014leapt into the fossil record. Those early marine animals exhibited a dazzling array of body plans, as though evolution needed to indulge a creative streak before buckling down. For more than a century, scientists have struggled to make heads or tails\u2014sometimes literally\u2014of those specimens, figure out how they relate to life today, and understand what fueled the evolutionary explosion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Circa 2018 KOOTENAY NATIONAL PARK IN CANADA\u2014 The drumming of the jackhammer deepens. Then, a block of shale butterflies open, exposing to crisp mountain air a surface that hasn\u2019t seen sunlight in half a billion years. \u201cWoo!\u201d says paleontologist C\u00e9dric Aria of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, bracing the top slab [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}