A Secret Place for my Favorite Secret Things

The Cambrian explosion, or Cambrian radiation, was the relatively rapid appearance, around 530 million years ago, of most major animal phyla, as demonstrated in the fossil record,^[1][2] accompanied by major diversification of organisms including animals, phytoplankton, and calcimicrobes.^[3] Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. Over the following 70 or 80 million years, the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude (as defined in terms of the extinction and origination rate of species^[4]) and the diversity of life began to resemble that of today.^[5]