Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Cambrian Explosion - Ecdysozoans

Among the fauna of the Cambrian Explosion Ecdysozoans are one of the most spectacular, and the fossil taxa have an appearance that seems to be about as morphologically complicated as their extant counterparts nearly all of them are stem or crown phyla, and in some cases appear to represent branches which are even earlier from which the stems of crown phyla branched in turn. They are almost certainly preserved more easily than the lophophorates that have no mineralised skeleton, because even ecdysozoans that have soft bodies have cuticles that are usually toughened. There are 2 large clades of ecdysozoans, the Panarthropoda, including the lobopods and the arthropods, and the Cycloneuralia, including the nematode and Scalidophora.

Sources & Further reading

  1. Erwin, Douglas H., & Valentine, James W., 2013, The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, Roberts & Co., Greenwood Village, Colorado
Author: M. H. Monroe
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Last Updated 10/05/2014
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                                                                                           Author: M.H.Monroe  Email: admin@austhrutime.com     Sources & Further reading