Those white cliffs are a dense Cambrian limestone.

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

Their formation began more than 500 million years ago during the Precambrian and continues till now.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.