[Coyoteman]

Sorry, no more Cambrian explosion.

[xcamel]

A good cambrian rock with a fossil in it is damned hard to find....

[DevNet]

Never believed it anyway - still think that the Doctor and K-9 had something to do with it :)

[TheBattman]

Actually - the real answer to his delimma is quite simple... but I won’t post it because there are certain Freepers who would call me a Christian/Religious idiot for believing the Bible...

[dangus]

Hardly explains Darwin’s dilemma, unless I’m misunderstanding the article. Darwin would never have been surprised to find a lack of protist fossils; it was that so many lines of metazoa seemed to emerge at once.

[Caramelgal]

Sorry, no more Cambrian explosion.

Thanks for the post Coyoteman.

Well it would now seem to be apparent that the Cambrian explosion was more of a Precambrian gradual evolution. The Precambrian was a time when "the world swarmed with living creatures" – Cool!

But I’m still a big fan of the Cambrian – such diversity and so many really cool animals!

[3niner]

Well, not quite.

As mentioned in the article, the pre-Cambrian fossils were uni-cellular. Single celled organisms leave very small fossils, which are very hard to find. The Cambrian explosion was the explosion of multi-cellular life, after the first complex organisms evolved. These organisms leave much more identifiable traces in rock strata.

There may have been just as much life, when it was all single celled, but it's difficult to tell.

[DoctorMichael]

Sorry, no more Cambrian explosion.

Good stuff! Thanks for posting!

[count-your-change]

Sorry, no more Coyoteman. I can name six or seven phylum (basic families) that first appeared during the Cambrian.

Darwin's Dilemma is how to figure out a way to make the Cambrian record disappear.