16. A New Hope

As for the rest of you invertebrates

Continue on your way!

Move up!

Keep changing!

Diversify!

Swarm the oceans!

Remember your trilobite forebears!

They brought you into this new world!

So they did.

The extinction gave new opportunities

To the animals.

New niches were opened.

Bryozoans formed forests as corals created reefs.

Brachiopods littered the seafloor.

They diversified.

Habitats opened up.

New creatures moved in.

Adaptive radiation brought new styles

To shelly animals.

A nice little bit of insurance from predators,

While Brachiopods articulated Conodonts made teeth out of bone.

Graptolites floated lazily by

Guiding fossil hunters to the Ordivician and Silurian.

15. The Extinction

As continents moved and eroded

They slowly reached for the South Pole.

Ocean currents became disrupted,

Ice sheets slowly crossed the barren land.

Gondwana glaciation brought its icy cold grip to the populous of the Ordovician.

Oxygen was depleted.

Animals suffocated.
Falling to the bottom,
They were buried.

They were held for years until someone dug them up.

We must remember them as they once were.

Great pioneers of the oceans.

The poor creatures of the explosion

Most of them dead like the trilobites

Paving the way for us as we pave that way with them.

Limestone graves for archeocyathids, trilobites, and coral grew.

Here lies so-and-so.

There lies what’s-his-name and so on.

Remember them my friends.

We have a lot to thank them for.

Your time will come as well.

May you rest peacefully in your rocky tombs.

No longer will you have to worry about predators.

Archeocyathids and trilobites are no more.

They will be missed.

14. The Explosion

An explosion of life

Came rushing from simple designs.

The bomb had gone off.

New creatures.

Strange creatures.

Wiwaxia,

Morella,

Yohoia,

Plenocaris,

Canadaspis,

Corals,

Trilobites,

Anomalocaris,

Ottoia,

Waptia.

Hallucigenia

Continents joined and divided

Sculpting the landscape above and below the waves

As little archeocyathids grew into ocean forests.

Ancestors of fish and us,

The little squirts,

Swarmed the seas

Breeding in the Cambrian.

New life exploded on the scene

The trigger remained a mystery.

Shelled and soft creatures lurked in the water.

This was the hunting ground of Anamalocaris

The terror of the deep.

Claws that grasp

Beak that bites.

Even the kindly armored trilobite was no match for him.

The others nibbled and grazed on the bottom as Ottoia burrowed in the soft sand.

It dug around snatching poor creatures up when they wandered too close.

That was life in the Cambrian.