Geology links

Early life

 

 

• A New Molecular Window on Early Life
• A uniquely preserved Ediacaran fossil with direct evidence for a quilted bodyplan
• Biodiversity of the Ediacaran-early Cambrian transition in northwestern Argentina and related areas
• Burgess Shale
• BurgessShale.com - Information and Resources about the Burgess Shale
• Burgess Shale fossils
• Chris Nedin's Page
• Critters of the Burgess Shale
• Digital Burgess Shale Photo Album
• Ediacara
• Ediacaran Fossils of Canada
• Fossils: The Key to the Past, Morphology of Early Life - 500 Million Years Ago
• From the beginning at The Natural History Museum
• History of Earth Origins of Life and Death
• Large spinose microfossils in Ediacaran rocks as resting stages of early animals
• Mistaken Point, Newfoundland - Vendian locality
• National Museum of Natural History - Burgess Shale
• Origin of the Eumetazoa: Testing ecological predictions of molecular clocks against the Proterozoic fossil record
• Precambrian Fossils
• Skeletons of Burgess Shale Animals
• The controversial “Cambrian” fossils of the Vindhyan are real but more than a billion years older
• The Dawn of Animal Life
• The Late Precambrian Fossils from Ediacara, South Australia
• The Origins of Life Prebiotic Evolution and the Precambrian Fossil Record
• The Yoho-Burgess Shale Foundation
• Vendian Animals - The First Animals

Books about early life

The Rise and Fall of the Ediacaran Biota The Proterozoic and early Phanerozoic was a time punctuated by a series of significant events in Earth history. Glaciations of global scale wracked the planet, interfingered with dramatic changes in oceanic and atmospheric chemistry and marked changes in continental configuration. It was during these dynamic and 'weedy' times that metazoans first appeared, diversified, culminating in the appearance of hard tissue skeletons and deep 'farming' of the marine substrate, in late Proterozoic and first few millions of years of the Phanerozoic. This book is the culmination of two symposia of UNESCO International Geological Correlation Project 493, one in Prato (Italy) in 2004, the second in Kyoto (Japan) in 2006. Both dealt specifically with the precise timing of physical events and teasing out of the effects which these changing environments, climates, global chemistry and palaeogeography had on the development and diversification of animals, culminating in the spectacular Ediacaran/Vendian faunas of the late Precambrian.