EDGE Science has a nice video summary of the paper “Palaeocampa anthrax, an armored freshwater lobopodian with chemical defenses from the Carboniferous”, which was the subject of yesterday’s Mazon Monday post (see Mazon Monday #280).

At this point, the Cambrian Explosion is a paleontology meme that has bled so far into the pop-culture zeitgeist that many people only know about it detached from its context. The Cambrian explosion is a real period of evolutionary divergence in animal life, but research over the last 30 to 40 years has now shown it to have not been a true explosion in the overall complexity of life – life had existed in complex ways before the Cambrian period, and things are increasingly looking like complexity had existed for quite a while. Interestingly, most of the groups to which the animal mascots of the Cambrian belong continue to have their extinction dates pushed closer to today. In other words, these things didn’t all poof out of existence after the Cambrian explosion. Despite the divergence of life into forms that we may be more familiar with, plenty of old Cambrian weirdo groups continued on throughout the Paleozoic era, and some even beyond – to today’s world. One very enigmatic teeny tiny squishy creature has had an interestingly winding scientific history – it has connections to the Cambrian explosion but was found in the Age of Coal and Bugs. It was once thought to be the world’s first caterpillar, but the newest research has found it to be a completely different handful of world first’s. Why don’t we take a look?