Darwin's dilemma resolved: Evolution's 'big bang' explained by 5x faster rates
Thursday, September 12, 2013 - 16:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
A living arthropod (centipede Cormocephalus) crawls over its 515-million-year-old relative that lived during the Cambrian explosion (trilobite Estaingia). The incredible burst of innovation in animals' body plans and habits during the Cambrian explosion, between 540 and 520 million years ago, can be explained by a reasonable uptick in evolutionary rates. The discovery, based on the first rigorous estimates of early evolutionary rates in arthropods, shows that evolution's "big bang" is compatible with natural selection as Darwin envisioned it, say researchers reporting their findings in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on September 12.