Tag: Cambrian Explosion
Is There Enough Phosphorus for Us?
The element phosphorus, on which life heavily depends for its codes and metabolic processes, is a limiting factor for complex beings on habitable planets.
Fossil Friday: Nectocaris, the Impossible Squid
Paleontology sometimes seems like a kind of imaginative Rorschach test with the flattened fauna of roadkill.
Recognizing Providence in the History of Life Is a Hint About Our Own Lives
Any of us can point to certain pivotal events in our past that need not have occurred, but did.
Complex Specified Information in the Lowly Sponge
Sponges are outliers in biology’s big bang, the Cambrian explosion. Their embryos appear in Precambrian strata, leading some to consider them primitive.
Fossil Friday: Dickinsonia, the Ediacaran Animal that Wasn’t
Gregory Retallack is a kind of maverick paleontologist, who endorses a fringe hypothesis that Ediacaran organisms were not marine but terrestrial lichens.