INVERTEBRATE FOSSILS
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For
over 3.5 billion years, life has been growing, dividing, changing and
developing into a myriad of
Much of Earth's life history has been relatively uneventful with roughly the first three billion years only consisting of life forms that were simple single-cell organisms like bacteria and algae. At times, these organisms amassed into colonies called Stromatolites but nothing more. About 600 million years ago, complex multi-cellular organisms similar to jellyfish, emerged. |
Today, the animal kingdom has a little over a million described species comprising 32 phyla. The phylum of Arthropoda (insects, spiders, centipedes and crustaceans, for instance) alone make up 82% of all known species of life on Earth. If we include all invertebrates (excluding bacteria and virii), we now are talking about 94% of known species! ALL vertebrates, that is, creatures with internal skeletons and backbones, comprise only 3% of all known species on our planet. Despite their size, INVERTEBRATES are truly the heavyweights on our planet! All images and text on this site are protected by copyright and may not be used in any way. |
forms. One factor about all life on
Earth that has remained constant though, is that Invertebrates or
creatures without an internal skeleton, have always outnumbered the
quantity of life forms in existence at any one time right up until today.
Invertebrates were the very first complex forms of life. As in the
past and still today, invertebrates are so vital that without their
existence, our entire planet and nearly all of its ecosystems would
cease to function!
Then,
approximately 530 million years ago during the Cambrian Period, an event
took place in life's history that has never been repeated. An
incredible diversity of life forms 'exploded' on the scene in
abundance. This occurrence is called the 'Cambrian Explosion' and
also marked the emergence of animals with hard external skeletons like
trilobites. Rumbling the foundation of macroevolution's theory is the
intricacy and sheer numbers of life forms that suddenly 'appeared' on our
planet compared to the crude and simplistic organisms that existed
prior. The Cambrian Explosion is one of the greatest mysteries to
paleontologists as well as evolutionists.