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    The Greatest Animal War

    by Brooke Borel Sep 18, 2014 3 minutes

    Battles fought 542 million years before today helped fuel a blast that brought humans and most animals into existence. The great Cambrian Explosion was a period of unprecedented one-upmanship. Beastly claws crushed through thin skin, and soft-bodied creatures evolved shells shaped like scythes, sickles, and shields.

    For about a billion years prior, the cells and genes that would later create animals were evolving in microscopic organisms who inhabited the oceans of Earth (see ). These essential molecular changes may only be inferred today because they’re not preserved in fossils. The earliest traces of animals, about 580 million years old, appear soft, with no sign of claws, teeth, limbs, or brains. Then, within 54 million years (a relative blink but still,

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