Ben Shoemate's Notebook

635 million years ago, almost the entire planet was a frozen ball of ice. And yet mere tens of millions of years later a population explosion happened deep underwater in South China, preceding the better-known Cambrian explosion by a significant time period. In these oxygen-free waters, more than 3,000 fossils of 15 species of seaweeds and worms lived briefly, and then all died suddenly. More »