ReviewNature ecology & evolution2019
Integrated records of environmental change and evolution challenge the Cambrian Explosion.
Review in Nature ecology & evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 63 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed.
- Algal δNature communications · 2026Article
- Tectonic controls governing reservoir heterogeneity within a stepped carbonate platform of the Sinian Dengying Formation in the Sichuan Basin, China.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Earth system instability explains redox paradox during late Cambrian SPICE event.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- A smartphone analogy to explore the origin of animals.The EMBO journal · 2026Review
- The terminal Ediacaran Tongshan Lagerstätte from South China.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Community hydrodynamics created ecological opportunity in Ediacaran shallow marine ecosystems.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Ocean deoxygenation after the Sturtian Snowball.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Sustained shift in the morphology of organic-walled microfossils over the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Earth's magnetic field and its relationship to the origin of life, evolution and planetary habitability.National science review · 2025Review
- Morphogenesis of Fractofusus andersoni and the nature of early animal development.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Deciphering the biosynthetic potential of microbial genomes using a BGC language processing neural network model.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Astronomically calibrating early Ediacaran evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Benthic diel oxygen variability and stress as potential drivers for animal diversification in the Neoproterozoic-Palaeozoic.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Morphological Evolution and Extinction of Eodiscids and Agnostoid Arthropods.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Co-occurrence structure of late Ediacaran communities and influence of emerging ecosystem engineers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Deep learning revealed the distribution and evolution patterns for invertible promoters across bacterial lineages.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
- Co-evolution of early Earth environments and microbial life.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2024Review
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The 'Cambrian Explosion' describes the rapid increase in animal diversity and abundance, as manifest in the fossil record, between ~540 and 520 million years ago (Ma). This event, however, is nested within a far more ancient record of macrofossils extending at least into the late Ediacaran at ~571 Ma. The evolutionary events documented during the Ediacaran-Cambrian interval coincide with geochemical evidence for the modernisation of Earth's biogeochemical cycles. Holistic integration of fossil and geochemical records leads us to challenge the notion that the Ediacaran and Cambrian worlds were markedly distinct, and places biotic and environmental change within a longer-term narrative. We propose that the evolution of metazoans may have been facilitated by a series of dynamic and global changes in redox conditions and nutrient supply, which, potentially together with biotic feedbacks, enabled turnover events that sustained multiple phases of radiation. We argue that early metazoan diversification should be recast as a series of successive, transitional radiations that extended from the late Ediacaran and continued through the early Palaeozoic. We conclude that while the Cambrian Explosion represents a radiation of crown-group bilaterians, it was simply one phase amongst several metazoan radiations, some older and some younger.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.