Those white cliffs are a dense Cambrian limestone.

Cambrian dating The time range for the Cambrian has classically been thought to have been from about 542 million years ago (mya) to about 488 mya.

The Cambrian Ordovician extinction event occurred approximately 488 million years ago (m.y.a.).

While the early Cambrian showed such diversification that it has been named the Cambrian Explosion, this changed later in the period, when it was exposed to a sharp drop in biodiversity.

Various triggers for the Cambrian explosion have been proposed, including the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere from photosynthesis.

So the Cambrian Explosion, when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, took only 10 million years.

In the Cambrian explosion, life emerged from the swamps, complexity arose, and from what we can tell, we're halfway through.

It is difficult to estimate the rate of eye evolution because the fossil record, particularly of the Early Cambrian, is poor.

A more precise date of 542 0.3 mya for the extinction event at the beginning of the Cambrian has recently been submitted.

Complex eyes appear to have first evolved within a few million years, in the rapid burst of evolution known as the Cambrian explosion.

There is a gap of about 100 million years between the beginning of the Cambrian period and the end of the Ordovician period.

So the Cambrian Explosion, when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, took only 10 million years. It was 200 times faster.

But it wasn't until about 500 million years ago during the Cambrian geologic time period that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials.

And I've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design.

We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks, and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions that are actually quite recent.

Life before the Cambrian It is not known when life originated, but carbon in 3.8 billion year old rocks from islands off western Greenland may be of organic origin.

And the what, I think, is that we returned, over and over again, to the Pre Cambrian world, that first microbial age, and the microbes are still out there.

The series draws on the knowledge of over 600 scientists and depicts Paleozoic history, from the Cambrian Period (530 million years ago) to the Early Triassic Period (248 million years ago).

Lapworth, recognizing that the fossil fauna in the disputed strata were different from those of either the Cambrian or the Silurian periods, realized that they should be placed in a period of their own.

You have a little bit of thickening in the line because people do have disagreements, what the key points are, there's differences of opinion when agriculture started, or how long the Cambrian Explosion took.

The fauna was dominated by tiered communities of suspension feeders, mainly with short food chains this said, the ecological system reached a new grade of complexity far beyond that of the Cambrian fauna, which has persisted until the present day.

And again, it forms the same straight line. You have a little bit of thickening in the line because people do have disagreements, what the key points are, there's differences of opinion when agriculture started, or how long the Cambrian Explosion took.