The Cambrian Period: The First Premophic Period Of The Paleozoic Period
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The Cambrian period is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era which was about 56 million years from the end of the prior Precambrian to the beginning of the Ordovician Period. The Cambrian period is the beginning of a large difference in life on Earth. Before the Cambrian most of the life was very simple and unicellular. For the first time we began to see more multicellular forms of life. "The oceans became oxygenated. Although there was a lot of atmospheric oxygen by the beginning of the period, it wasn't until the Cambrian that there was a sufficient reduction in the number of oxygen-depleting bacteria to permit higher oxygen levels in the waters. This dissolved oxygen may have triggered the "'Cambrian Explosion'". (Cambrian) It produced the first creatures…show more content… "The majority of this complex life, lived in the ocean; with the only life on land being nothing more complex than soil crust and a few mollusk shells. This is most likely due to the lack of vegetation."(Bollinger)
World climates were mild with no glaciers. Landmasses are scattered as a result of the supercontinent Rodinia that had existed in the late Proterozoic. Most of North America lay in warm southern tropical and temperate latitudes, which supported the growth of extensive shallow-water archaeocyathid reefs all through the early Cambrian. The Cambrian follows the Ediacaran Period, during which time the continents had been joined in a single supercontinent called Rodinia . At the beginning of the Cambrian, Rodinia began to fragment into smaller continents, which does not correspond to the ones we see today. Pannotia was also in the process of breaking up starting with North America, Baltica, and Siberia all separating from the main land to form their