WHEN LIFE EXPLODED

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AN HOUR LATER AND HE MIGHT NOT have noticed the rock, much less stooped to pick it up. But the early morning sunlight slanting across the Namibian desert in southwestern Africa happened to illuminate momentarily some strange squiggles on a chunk of sandstone. At first Douglas Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, wondered if the meandering markings might be dried-up curls of prehistoric sea mud. But no, he decided after studying the patterns for a while, these were burrows carved by a small, wormlike creature that arose in long-vanished subtropical seas--an archaic organism that, as Erwin later confirmed, lived about 550 million years ago, just before the geological period known as the Cambrian.

As such, the innocuous-seeming creature and its curvy spoor mark the threshold of a critical interlude in the history of life. For the Cambrian is a period distinguished by the abrupt appearance of an astonishing array of multicelled animals--animals that are the ancestors of virtually all the creatures that now swim, fly and crawl through the visible world.

Indeed, while most people cling to the notion that evolution works its magic over millions of years, scientists are realizing that biological change often occurs in sudden fits and starts. And none of those fitful starts was more dramatic, more productive or more mysterious than the one that occurred shortly after Erwin's wormlike creature slithered through the primordial seas. All around the world, in layers of rock just slightly younger than that Erwin discovered, scientists have found the mineralized remains of organisms that represent the emergence of nearly every major branch in the zoological tree. Among them: bristle worms and roundworms, lamp shells and mollusks, sea cucumbers and jellyfish, not to mention an endless parade of arthropods, those spindly legged, hard-shelled ancient cousins of crabs and lobsters, spiders and flies. There are even occasional glimpses--in rock laid down not long after Erwin's Namibian sandstone--of small, ribbony swimmers with a rodlike spine that are unprepossessing progenitors of the chordate line, which leads to fish, to amphibians and eventually to humans.

Where did this extraordinary bestiary come from, and why did it emerge so quickly? In recent years, no question has stirred the imagination of more evolutionary experts, spawned more novel theories or spurred more far-flung expeditions. Life has occupied the planet for nearly 4 billion of its 4.5 billion years. But until about 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled algae and single-celled plankton. The first hint of biological ferment was a plethora of mysterious palm-shape, frondlike creatures that vanished as inexplicably as they appeared. Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within the span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialized with the suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom. This explosion of biological diversity is described by scientists as biology's Big Bang.