Extraordinary soft-bodied fossils highlight the Cambrian explosion 

I am always amazed when I see how remote and how high the Burgess Shale is. What a mind blowing discovery.

This presentation is quite fun when you pretend the beginning is a seance summoning Derek.

Fantastic in-depth presentation! Shame that so few people are watching it. It deserves a lot more.

I think the 10 min. of preamble is what puts people off. All the important information about the speakers could go in the description , not the video.The content is wonderful.

Interesting how these strange animals are not so strange as was previously thought with respect to relation to known species.

Fascinating, and so well presented. I'm happy to know this kind of progress is underway.

The Cambrian explosion RULES!!

Key to understanding 'weird' fossils is to: 1) not forget that flatworms had/have circular ventral mouth parts and are basal to all bilaterals; 2) ribbon and round worms are basal to most (not all) taxa with a mouth on one end and an anus on the other, or slightly below a short extension that could be an adhesive production area or a mobile muscular tail originally used for burrowing and travel, as in basal chordates; 3) segmented taxa, like arthropods, are close to segmented worms like velvet worms and annelids; 4) unsegmented taxa, like echinoderms, molluscs and chordates are also close to one another. Hagfish, nautiloids and certain round worms share tentacles around a subterminal mouth with eversible mouth parts with teeth. Some flatworms and Tullimonstrum have a mouth-like extendable 'trunk' used to anchor it. Finally, flat, swimming semi-segmented to segmented taxa, like Anomalocaris and trilobites, can arise directly from semi-subdivided flatworms with twin antennae that convergently develop a separate terminal anus.

This presentation was a cut above most others. Very well done and of course Mr. Briggs is brilliant as always.

Read "Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould. All about the Burgess Fossils. He wrote about Briggs very highly.

🎯We got very beautiful cambrian fossils here in Montreal Canada... I found some very nice specimens on few church walls .. I do my best for identification but because I'm only amateur the job is very hard! Thanks for giving me a lot of information 🥂 😷👍

Oops... indeed I just had breakfast. Interesting talk so far, love the diversity of photographs and illustrations and how they're used to home on the point you're making or subject at hand. Not a dull moment, I'm learning a lot :)

Very interesting, thank you!

Oh cool he was one of the researchers to first identify the true nature of the first radiodont anomalocaris. Regarding radiodonts what blows my mind is how over my lifetime they went from obscure Cambrian dead end organisms to a much more diverse and lasting lineage with Ordovician suspension feeders and even late fossil specimens known from Lagerstatten as recently as the Devonian. It is a sad nature of the fossil record that we may never know how long any given evolutionary lineage really lasted or even a fraction of the full biodiversity of life on Earth. Regarding Lagerstatten isn't there also evidence to suggest anaerobic conditions played a role in many of their formations? I know the oxidation of the oceans has been quite variable over the Earths history really starting near the Great Oxidation Event then dropping off after the first snowball interval and only resurging in the Neoproterozoic there was an interesting paper in nature communications regarding the study of modern pelagic photoferrotrophs which provides an interesting case for the late oxygenation of the atmosphere being linked to photoferrothrophs being more evolutionarily fit at utilizing resources as anaerobic bacteriochlorophylls are able to efficiently photosynthesize in deeper waters meaning high nutrient flux diffusing from the seafloor. Its an interesting hypothesis that energetically makes sense as the stronger bond will take more energy to break meaning higher energy photons are needed. In that picture the oxygenation pulses required an excess of nutrients mainly phosphorus to photosynthesize. In such a model the evolutionary arms race between iron and or sulfur based respiring organisms and aerobic organisms might have gotten fairly tough with the equivalent of a metabolic arms race that continues to this day in remote environments. As for the interaction between trilobites and anomalocaris and other radiodonts I imagine the bite marks could in either case be explained during the molting phase where they like other arthropods would be vulnerable and in nature today predators and indeed even non predatory animals when provided the opportunity tend to be opportunists plus different radiodonts were probably specialized for different prey generally based off modern examples natural systems turn out more complicated than our models and hypothesis tend to suggest. Also a missed opportunity when talking about the lobopods to mention the third extant lineage the tardigrades.

Such an excellent lecture! This grasps my love of biology and history that have caused me to delve deeply in to many different disciplines with great joy. Another thing I am grateful for is politics don't yet effect this branch of science as it does paleoanthropology. An example being Cheddar Man. As if we "common" folk don't understand Cheddar Man likely had much more Neandertal DNA than we do today and was more "white" than we are. Shame on them for lying to mollify BLM. I pray that weakness doesn't spread to other disciplines.

Thank you for making available such fascinating research insights to laymen like me! Regarding the map shown around 31:00, I wonder how the scientists (I'd guess geologists?) are able to reproduce how the Earth looked like 550 Mio years before? The biggest part of the landmass seemed to have been on the southern hemisphere then. How do we know this? And is there a certain uncertainty for these models?

Amasing. I'de be interested in how furca is described as an arthropod? do you have more information as it looks to me like a cinadarian.

Very informative. Thanks for posting

Love this. Calling from Beaumont Texas

I am reminded of stories where excavators often smell peculiar decay in relation to dinosaur fossil excavations. Why this doesn't suggest soft tissue survival in these animals is not clear.

A fascinating presentation. Some interesting developments since Stephen Jay Gould first presented these amazing animals to the general public.

Good good info! Cheers!!

Great work

Once we were all sea cucumbers, not much has changed.

Great stuff. Fascinating.

Seems like connectivity issue is the 21st century version of a failing slide projectors 😋

I prefer my pineapple rings without jaws! Great talk, thanks for sharing.

When Simon Conway Morris saw Hallucigenia, he was like, "WHOAH, man, I'd better... come down."

Who knew that the roots of the cannabis explosion went back that far?

OMG, thank you so much! You have solved 2 of the mystery fossils I have been trying to identify! Then there's one bigger mystery, tied to one of them that PLEASE CAN ANYONE HELP EXPLAIN?!! Please read the end of this comment and maybe someone can help me understand something odd about 1 of the fossils I have. But 1st, the trilobite @12:00 is identical to one I have in fragments, found in Kokomo, IN inside a hematite concretion when I broke it open! I have just started casting the pieces in epoxy resin. Now the 2nd fossil, that I now am seeing is some kind of bristleworm(s) that is encased in local Howard County, Indiana limestone that I have been soaking in HCl solution to release more of the fossil, something very odd(in my opinion) has been releasing from within the dissolving limestone that I can't make sense of. Can someone please watch the video I compiled of microscopic clips and some stills of this debris that I collected from the acid bath solution while checking the progress on the fossil, that you can see is clearly soft, fleshy tentacle-like tubes that look under the microscope like they could have been alive just yesterday! Please!! watch this video and tell me WTF is this stuff, and what creature it comes from?? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7h3EeR31mZE.html

Watched a few of these and there is a strong impression the intended audience is 8-12 years of age. Very puzzling.

film tear at the crucial point ? ...

How long takes a soft bodied animal to turn in fossil?

I'm surprised that people don't point to the advent of predation as a very likely cause of the need for an explosion of species, in addition to the increase of temps and oxygen and opening up of new ecosystem niches as a result of all of the above. Predation would cause an arms race and the arms race in addition to the warming and oxygenation would both lead to the development of new ecological niches.

Hello from Ohio,USA

There seems to be a problem between the talk and what appears on the screen. It is not possible to relate the spoken word to the pictures.

Kudos, pronounced “Ediacaran” correctly.

What about high radiation preserving soft tissue? And if this high radiation happened once giving us the sensation of an "explosion" when it could be just a single event? How this soft tissue is preserved in nature, out of laboratory?

Excellent Review. Evolution/Conception in continuous temporal perspective of coherence-cohesion objectives, centred on Superspin/Singularity superposition spin-spiral, -> logarithmic condensation probabilities corresponding to a Math-Phys-Chem and Geometry wave-package here-now-forever. Which is WYSIWYG pulse-evolution projection-drawing holographic Singularity-point objective-imaging => vertices in vortices orthogonality perspectives, all operating on empirical shaping laws, all-ways in a unified/holistic vibrating Now. (Not just linear sequences of pages in the Celestial mapping system, that seems to be the default perception, although this is how we assemble visual images in Mind/Imagination)

Why not edit out the gap? Very very lazy.

It is giant snails that are invading people's home right now along with locust We are in pestilence book revelation

You talk too much