Paleozoic Era · Cambrian Period
Earth 500 Million Years Ago: The Cambrian Seas
What Earth looked like 500 million years ago: warm shallow seas full of trilobites, bare continents and Gondwana spread across the south.
Spin it in 3D and move through timeMap: Ancient maps: PALEOMAP PaleoDEMs (Scotese & Wright 2018), CC BY 4.0 · Natural Earth.
500 million years ago, in the late Cambrian, the world was warm and sea levels were high. Shallow seas covered much of North America, Siberia and the edges of Gondwana, and they teemed with trilobites, brachiopods and early relatives of today’s animal groups.
On land there was still nothing green. The first animals to venture out may have been arthropods leaving trackways on coastal sand, found in Cambrian rocks of Quebec and Ontario.
Gondwana stretched from the equator to the South Pole. Laurentia sat on the equator, while the Iapetus Ocean separated it from Baltica and from Avalonia, a strip of land that would later become parts of England, Newfoundland and New England.
Events of the time
Ediacara fossils
555 million years ago · Ediacara Hills, Australia
Imprints of soft-bodied animals such as Dickinsonia, now known to be an animal from the fats preserved in it.
Chengjiang fossils
518 million years ago · Yunnan, China
Soft-bodied animals preserved in fine mud, including some of the earliest relatives of vertebrates: a snapshot of the Cambrian explosion.
Burgess Shale
508 million years ago · British Columbia, Canada
A Cambrian sea floor with strange animals such as five-eyed Opabinia and the predator Anomalocaris, then near the equator.
Ice sheet over the Sahara
445 million years ago · North Africa
Scratched rock and glacial deposits in the Sahara show that ice covered North Africa when it lay over the South Pole. The cold and falling seas killed about 85% of marine species.
Part of the Paleozoic Era & The Cambrian Explosion.