Cambrian Art

This fragment of a rock discovered in Morocco and exhibited at the Museum of Natural History of Toulouse wears the fossilized skeletons of marine animals : trilobites, starfishes, sea urchins, whose origin dates back to the Cambrian, either to half a billion years or so.

At this early period, and mainly for environmental (increased concentration of atmospheric oxygen) and ecological (evolution of the food chain) reasons, life explodes in all its forms: animal, plant and bacterial. Formerly mostly unicellular, occasionally grouped into colonies, the organisms become pluricellular, largest and most diversified.

They gradually colonize almost all the seas of the globe, from the surface to the abyss, from the equator to the poles. So that the Cambrian lands are now present on every continents. In particular, they form the major part of the Pyrenees; different strata of the Montagne Noire (southwestern France) testify as for them the successive phases of the diversification of species.