E pensar que em nossas universidades é ensinado que a ciência e a mentira não podem andar de mãos dadas. Omitir dados científicos é uma forma de mentir...
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The chordate Haikouichthys, part of the Chengjiang fauna, may be the oldest creatures related with human being. It’s shedding new light on the Cambrian Explosion.
Source/Fonte.
Eis algumas citações de cientistas sobre o significado deste evento abrupto:
"...my colleagues and I have spent much of the past 15 years traveling to remote corners of the world searching for clues to the early evolution of life. By sifting through ancient sediments, we have sought to understand the nature of life just before the Ediacaran animals appear in the fossil record and to identify environmental factors that may explain the timing of their appearance. Our time has been well spent. We now know that the Ediacaran radiation was indeed abrupt and that the geologic floor to the animal fossil record is both real and sharp."
— Knoll, Andrew H.. "End of the Proterozoic eon" in Scientific American, :, 64-73, 1991.
"The sudden and great proliferation of complex forms of sea- dwelling animal life came at the base of the Cambrian Period (now known to be about 575 million years ago); as we shall see later in this chapter, this event remains one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of life. When paleontologists thought that no fossils were to be found in any older rocks, they did not leap to the conclusion that life had all of a sudden been invented at the beginning of Cambrian times.
Particularly because Darwin had so convincingly argued that life evolves slowly, requiring huge amounts of time to accumulate significant change, few paleontologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were willing to claim that the apparently sudden advent of complex creatures 575 million years ago was an actual evolutionary event. They preferred to see it as an artifact of geological processes: they noted that most older rocks were either igneous or the metamorphosed remnants of sedimentary rocks whose fossils had been baked and squeezed out of existence.
Life had been there in those earlier eons, they felt sure, but simply had not survived the ravages of time. Especially since life had diversified into a wondrous array of mollusks (snails, clams, and the like), arthropods (trilobites plus more modern groups such as insects and crustaceans), echinoderms (the starfish/sea urchin clan), brachiopods (the dominant shellfish group of ancient seas) and other, less-well-known creatures, paleontologists quite naturally felt that there must have been a truly long period of slow evolution to allow all these different forms to derive front the common ancestor they were supposed to have shared. Wrong on both counts.
Careful paleontological detective work begun in the 1950s has revealed an extensive, if elusive, early fossil record. And this new Precambrian paleontology has made us take that early Cambrian event much more seriously, for it does not bear out the predicted long, slow history of diversification of complex life. That early Cambrian spurt of life looms now as one of the most important ecological and genealogical events in the entire history of life. And the events leading up to it, during life's first 3 billion years, give little inkling of what was to follow. The stage was set in those first 3 billion years, but only in the most general sort of way: looking at that unbelievably long and seemingly almost uneventful early history of life, there was simply no way anyone could have anticipated what happened so relatively quickly when complex animal life finally appeared on the scene."
— Eldredge, Niles "Chapter 2: In The Beginning" in Life Pulse: Episodes from the Story of the fossil Record. Facts on File, New York, NY (1987), 1st edition, p.23-24.
