What triggered the Cambrian Explosion? with Professor Rachel Wood
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
- The origin and rise to dominance of animals - the Cambrian Explosion - from about 575 to 520 Million years ago was a revolutionary event on Earth. But why, and how, this happened at this time remains unresolved. Here I will explore two possible triggers for this event - a rise of oxygen in the atmosphere and in the oceans, and changes in the chemistry of sea water. I will explore these using examples from insight gained from fieldwork in Siberia and Namibia. We have made great strides over the last decade in understanding how changes in the earth system itself may have enabled the rise of complex life, but there is still much we have left to understand about this extraordinary event.
Rachel Wood has been Professor of Carbonate Geoscience at the University of Edinburgh since 2012. She has a first degree in Geology/Zoology, and a PhD in Geology. She held research fellowships at the Free University, Berlin, and the University of Cambridge, and worked in industry for 5 years before returning to academia in 2006. She was awarded the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London in 2020.
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It still blows my brain that a simpleton like me who wasn’t smart enough to get into higher education, can now get university lectures on my phone. For years now I’ve been watching professors explain subjects that I’m extremely interested in. I’ve learnt so much. And all for the low low price of handing over my data to big tech. Thank you UA-cam. Also. Massive props to this channel. Just discovered it the other day. No bullshit. No frills. Just really interesting content.
I know exactly what you mean. We are incredibly fortunate.
Yeah even dim wits are allowed to marvel
"All animals are created equal, but some animals are created more equal than others."-Orwell
So instead of follow the water, follow the oxygen.
A lot of work went into the collection and organization of this highly informative presentation.
So many presentations like this frustratingly and inexplicably turn off the comments. I greatly appreciate having comments available.
I've been curious about these things my whole life, really grateful for these talks!
Incredibly interesting research and hard work! I have recently refreshed evolution and origins of life on Earth, and it was great learning! Stay curious! ;)
Thank you for walking us through your methods and data! Really interesting studies!
Excellent lecture, very informative 10/10
James neville
I was shocked to learn from the thumbnail of this video that Peter Stampfel had released an album in 2017 with Burgess Shale fauna on the cover...because *I* released an album in 2017 with Burgess Shale fauna on the cover. Looks like Stampfel's beat mine by a matter of weeks.
Apparently 2017 was a golden age for albums released with cover art featuring the (somewhat less) enigmatic Cambrian fauna.
What genre is your album?
@@Transblucency My album *Paleozoic* is in an electronic/prog/ambient vein, so it couldn't be more different from Peter Stampfel's music! Track titles include "Extinction Event," "Silurian Swamp," and "Precambrian."
Most informative clear an concise explanation for the origin of the Cambrian I’ve seen on the internet. Thanks for this fantastic lecture.
Namibia makes total sense. It's almost like one could say "that's obvious," but of course it needed to be substantiated with observations. Kudos to everyone who slugged through all this laborious work to gather all this data into place - it's great seeing it pay off with a clear conclusion!
Thank you for the informative video.👍
Absolutely brilliant! Brava Prof. Wood! Congratulations to you and all of your fellow contributors.
i love this channel
So cool
I have been doing a lot of aerobic exercise lately and i'm still gaining weight. now i know why: too much oxygen. i'm not going back to the gym ever.
Not at all!!! You are abusing food and you do not have enough integrity to be impartial for that fact! It is remarkably simple: EAT LESS CALORIES!
@@quantumcat7673 i was making a joke. lighten up! i am not fat, and i do not, "abuse" food (i would only be abusing myself, not the food, if i were overeating.) GEEZ!
@@brentweissert6524 thats something only a vile food abuser would say!
always wanted to know this information and more like it. great work
Thank u :)
Interesting overview, like most things as your understanding increases the more complex the underlying process.
I can't believe we are allowed to talk about the Cambrian Explosion, because that makes Darwin look bad, in today's PC academia, Darwin is the new God.
@@seanleith5312 Only theists argue Darwin is a god. He gets a lot of credit but did not originate the notion life changes over time but he was to first to posit a mechanism.
Keep in mind the Cambrian Explosion took place over millions of years. The details are still cloudy but it probably had to do with increased oxygen levels that allowed a more energy intensive life style.
@@tomschmidt381 Well, "Only theists argue Darwin is a god.' I tend to disagree. It is true that atheists don't use the term, they tend to treat many things as religion: anthropogenic global warming for one, Evolution for another.
As you are aware, millions of years, in this context, is not a long time. Regardless what the reason might be, it contradicts the main theory of evolution, or at least it was an exception. That's why Darwin mentioned Cambrian Explosion, and admitted he didn't have an explanation for it. If we respect Darwin as we respect science, we should take his position in entirety, instead of cherry-picking the part that makes us feel good.
@@seanleith5312 Only theists think CE makes Darwin look bad. Scientific theory 90% complete is still better than fantasy book that is 0% accurate.
@@pavel9652 stop being racist against Muslims
Super awesome stuff!
Thanks for the education about oxygen and the oceans. Your presentation was both accessible and deep enough to really help me understand the questions being investigated, and to get the argument about causation. And I am going to check out the bluegrass album.
I'd like to hear your take on how the homeobox genes might have played a major role. They exploded from a few to maybe hundreds in about the same time. They are responsible for development of body form involving timing and position of development of body parts. Did an environment of high oxygen all of a sudden in water and in the air lead to an explosion in the evolution of the homeobox genes? Do you have any opinions on this?
Thanks, Rachel! Powerful arguments and intriguing research. I continue to be amazed at all the significant contributions you have made and are making that enhance our geologic understanding of the ancient past.
Rachael Wood is a real talent at explaining her work thanks
Great presentation, thanks for uploading these.
Lovely and very effective presentation. Thank you!
Thankfully these soft bodies survived..its humbling🌐
There are loads of fossilized worms at the beach down the lane from my house in South Wales. I'd love to know what period they're from.
Google is your friend. Look for geological information about the rocks in your area. The fossils are the same age as the sedimentary rocks they are trapped in.
@@pansepot1490 Thanks for the advice. Carboniferous limestone.
So they are somewhat younger then...200 million years or so?
They are from a rainy period. You're welcome.
Excellent presentation for us that want to widen our knowledge. Thank you very much, indeed...
Very informative.
Well you can't blame me , I was nowhere near it at the time. A big boy did it and ran away !
Fascinating! Thank you.
What about the Avalon explosion that lasted 33 millions years
Did they write a word each ?
I am spellbound.
Facinating research, thank you so much. Can I ask if other than oxygen levels have been researched and correlated? CO2 levels? Ferro levels? The development of blood and lungs? Magnetism? Vulcanic activity ? Comets ? Solar activity ?
4:56 I have a trilobite fossil. It is 507 million and 12 years old. Why the 12 years? Because when I bought it 12 years ago they told me it was 507 million years old.
Is the difference in behaviour of the brachipods because they were more mobile and could move into those areas less affected by reducing oxygen?
The answer is blowing in the wind.
The Varangar period..🥊
Was there a change in the water level during/ after the Sinsk? Sponges that need to be submerged to feed seem to disappear species that can live in shallower water/ surface or land seem to live. I suspect a second variable might explain the differences between the groups response at that time.
very good content, but disappointing audio quality.
Yea, gifted an Education
Oh, this is an easy one. It was last night's beef stroganoff.
Should have mentioned:
The energy of the organisms above the hydrothermal vents would not have been photosynthesis nor respiration, but thermosynthesis: energy gain from thermal cycling or thermal gradients. See my publications on ATP by a modified version of the chemiosmotic machinery.
I thought of the deep sea underwater vent animals when she mentioned the three types of oxygen containing waters Anoxic, Dysoxic and Oxic.
I was hanging on every word, thank you for this fascinating talk and to those who enabled us all to see it.
Sound poor.. echo or small room ? Small mike.. great voice but.. great talk!
You right !👨🏫👍
Probably some combination of junk mic, bad room, inexpert implementation, maybe a software issue. As much as I wanted to learn about the subject, I bailed at 00:00:09 to save my ears and my sanity.
Could it simply be because there were large numbers of niches available for them to fill. Once the niches were filled it became harder for new species to find suitable niches.
the word "trigger" itself is misleading. Since all such change or abundant rise of life and variety happened well over 60 million years (Approx 570Ma to 515Ma) - and the scientists can argue till kingdom come over the lack of evidence.
I don't understand how all niches can become filled. Once you have a new species, you can have its specialist predators, its parasites, its cohabitors, its cleanup crew, its...
Thank you for the lecture. I think you need to consult an oceanographer with your contention that cold water is causative (related?) to lower productivity. This seems to involve coding hypo-oxygenated as blue, euxinic as red. You posit that this is temperature rather than O2 levels, and then proceed to the "warm water is good for growth" hypothesis without explication. Cold, deep upwellings such as La Nina /El Nino semidecadal cycling do not seem to represent low-growth areas; rather the opposite. We do not have the data to support your contention about water temperature supporting speciation. It is, instead, correlatory not causative. The Cryogenian may well be the point of animal evolution, not the Totonian. Or it may be both heat (energy) and the paucity of heat later that set us on the path to -- us.
La Nina is in an oxygen-depleted area? Or very close to one? That's a major weather pattern there. Odd indeed. Thermal conduction must be affected by water content. Extremely interesting lecture.
Anne Elk (Miss)
Some people are so pleasant to listen to and she's definitely one of them.
Too bad the audio is so awful. It was very hard to follow.
The video cover looks kinuh like a grateful dead album cover ! ✌
I just came to see hallucigenia play the banjo...
Thinking of two and a half million years as a very brief interlude rather puts human history in its place, doesn't it? Human intervention in the history of our planet must be like a flash-bulb going off. Let us hope it is more like switching on a light, actually, not a flash-bulb.
If the case for oxygen fueling the Cambrian explosion is true then why didnt life on Earth experience a similar radiation event after the Great Oxidation Event
The vast majority of life preceding the GOE was anoxic life, so it wouldn’t have had the same catalyzing effect. There’s a possibility that life became eukaryotic during or right after the GOE though, so it’s arguable that we did get an evolutionary radiation from that event.
The GREAT Peter Stampfel whose famous Holy Model Rounders recording of "If You Want To Be A Bird" from the "Easy Rider" soundtrack always makes my Best Of Psychedelia list! Of course it was first to be found on the Morey Eels Eat The Holy Model Rounders record. Funny how Dennis Hopper didn't remember who recorded it when it came time for the extras on the deluxe Easy Rider DVD. I guess he wasn't into music as much as he was into movies.
Not to mention zinc and copper.
what the hell is my sleeping self doing here
I've heard of the oxygen theory before and it sounds right. My only query would be the lack of gigantism (you did allude to it) during the explosion. We've seen the effects of higher oxygen levels from the early insects to the dinosaurs. In the sea it should have been even more evident.
Sorry back to sports 😃🇨🇦
Maybe fruit fly labs could get giant flies via hyper-oxygenation?!
Sorry insects don't scale up very well, Same as spiders, an exoskeleton dosn't work above a certain size.
If you accept anything other than crowd funding I have issues
Very poor audio. Not hard or expensive to fix it.
You are ridiculously interesting.
The Precambrian detonator
Can you find a different word for Explosion? Who started that concept ?
It could have been caused by a build up of methane gas
😄😄😄⚡
The Website you linked us to is entirely in Chinese script without an English option whereby communication of relevant data is lost to a large percentage of viewers.
Very poor sound quality and the last words of some phrases are too quiet to hear.
Oxygen has huge implications to multicellular life😃
To solve this problem, I'm wondering if there was a part of the ocean very enriched with oxygen where all these animals evolved but that later when conditions changed across the rest of the planet, these animals then radiated out. The original location having been subducted or similar is no longer available to study. It would then look like they just appeared out of nowhere.
The poor audio make it hard to follow the arguments in some places.
Her tin cans need a new string.
Mad tight of you to rep some death metal on top of all this sick ass knowledge you're presenting us with!
David Attenborough made excellent documentary in 4 episodes called First life. It talks about Snowball Earth and Cambrian Explosion and much, much more. Highly recommended.
I can tell you how life 3nds. The earth sequesters all the remaining Co2
The Cambrian explosion is when evolution got smart, it started learning from it’s past, it accelerated species change through previous forms stored in DNA and reappearing in combinations to effect a change and it utilised a feedback loop which kept specific mostly homogeneous until a change was beneficial to some members of the species.
Who lit the fuse and how loud was the Cambi bang. Putting aside the big bang.
I would suppose given just the right level of various elements, life will find a way. Symbiosis. I also understand that geologic time is not “species” time. It might seem that Homo sapiens is strongly limited to believing they are the only extant species that matters. I might find occasion to disagree. Our world might unknowingly indicate its disapproval by eradication of said species. I’m not certain.
I miss school 🤢
All I know is, I'm glad most of them are extinct. They're hideous looking creatures from my worst nightmares. Bloody enormous too, some of them. 😱
It was like being at the most boring party ever, then discovering a fully stocked wine cellar.
The birth of suffering. How wonderful!
cambrian dynamite
Easy. Meiosis.
Well...yes...
Cell Division- Meiosis Will Tear Us Apart :)
What a lot of uncertainty and guess work please explain the complexity of the cell another maybe best guess have you any species change ?
Cells vary greatly in complexity. Eukaryotic cells are a lot more complex than prokaryotic, ie bacteria and archaea. The first protocells were far simpler yet.
@@blastulae there is no such thing as a simple cell they are extremely complex even the so-called simple cells look it up
@@stuartwilliams3164 As a biologist, I don’t need to look it up, but you do. Modern cells are of two basic types, ie simple cells, called prokaryotes, without nuclei and other organelles, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts, and more complex cells, with these features, called eukaryotes. The latter evolved from the former. The first eukaryote evolved from the union of two prokaryotes, when an archaeon engulfed a bacterium. This is called endosymbiosis. The bacterium became the ancestor of all mitochondria, which, even today retain their own DNA, separate from the archaeal DNA in the nucleus. Much of the bacterial DNA has however migrated into the nucleus.
But there’s more! The nucleus evolved thanks to a giant virus.
Not only are the cells of multicellular eukaryotes, ie plants, animals and fungi, much larger and more complex than those of prokaryotes, ie bacteria and archaea, but so are the unicellular eukaryotes, a diverse collection of groups called protists.
We can be confident that even simpler protocells preceded prokaryotes because so many other much simpler yet biological entities exist, called Mobile Genetic Elements, generally not considered alive. While clearly related to cellular organisms, they’re deemed “replicants”. These include viruses.
RNA viruses might predate cells, but some giant DNA viruses appear to descend from increasingly degenerate cells. Parasites tend to lose their no longer needed genetic material, but giant viruses still retain vestiges of metabolism genes.
Other DNA viruses, such as bacteriophages seem to have evolved separately, as MGEs which escaped from cells.
Jumping genes move around inside cells. They can move outside cells, as plasmids. Genetic material doing this may have evolved into parasitic phages.
RNA viruses resemble the ribosomes of cells, where mRNA instructions and tRNA bearing amino acids assemble proteins.
Free basic biological education for you. Please study the real world and reject creationist lies. Also please learn about subjects before presuming to comment on them out of total ignorance, indeed blatant misinformation.
@@blastulae I hope you realize the value of what you did by responding to Stuart. There are people teetering on the brink of superstition. Imagine their perception of science if they never see pushback against anti-science nonsense. And they vote.
Stuart used a common creationist tactic of, "Oh yeah? But what about this marginally related thing over here?" Maybe he wasn't expecting someone who could go there.
One would hope he won't challenge you further because he got the hint from your name.
@@rickmartin7596 It’s generally a hopeless task to educate creationists out of their superstitions, but at least they may use other lies in future. Creationism is both anti-scientific and false religion. Indeed blasphemy.
What's the smoking gun..😃🇨🇦
Yes..progressive science is real science 😃🇨🇦
She should have gotten David Attenborough to do her presentation.
She's a great preacher.
Can she explain chordates in the cambrian?
I think calling her a preacher is somewhat insulting. She is a highly educated scientist.
@@mitseraffej5812 Matty calls anyone who knows about the Cambrian names. He thinks chordates in the Cambrian means mammals and reptiles and birds.
He's a nong.
Oh Matt, you're such an ignoramus
As a Geology major, you are correct.
Only an ignorant person could think a fossil is made underwater but no flood, then explain chordates in the Cambrian with seashells amassing to form chordates.
😆😆😆😆😆
@@matta443 do you know what a chordate is?
A book I read some years ago suggested that the development of eyes played a major role in the Cambrian, as eyesight would be highly advantageous to both predators and their prey. So something of an arms race played out over millions of years.
I think you need to apply something similar to moore's law of CPU's to this " explosion ", you need to include intelligence as well, as the organisms grow over hundreds or thousand, millions of years, they accumulate knowledge within the DNA which is past down, and when the knowledge is was great enough, it exploded into new types of life. I believe one of the functions of DNA is to pass down the knowledge, very much like humans, past down from mother and father to offspring and as the knowledge grows it results in things like the industrial revolution.
Professor Rachel Wood emphasizes the oxygen level changes that played an important role in the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago.
That album was the absolute worst! Damn it was bad!
Well for starters, there was no "explosion". The Cambrian was a long time and rates of body plan change during the Cambrian don't exceed those of other time periods.
This is the first time I've heard that. Prior to the Cambrian we know of a dozen or two Phyla of animals and that number triples in 25 or 30 million years and most of the surviving phyla started than as well. In terms of species maybe it was similiar to other periods but in terms of higher order division of plants and animals I didn't think any other time period was as active and that's what the explosion refers too.
Don't get yer panties in a knot there Copernicus.
"Explosion" refers to the appearance of all major body plans in the fossil record within a geologically short time frame.
@@tommyodonovan3883
Copper nickers would be uncomfortable.
God triggered the Cambrian explosion, lol
Really? Who told you that?
@@jaymz1999 the Bible , Gods word!
@@jaymz1999 read Genesis chapter 1 and you'll see the story 😀
@@pennyvoll1169 Who told you that the bible is the words of gods?
@@jaymz1999 please don’t feed the Troll.
thankyou god
for healing the cataracts of Sam's Mum
@@DJCA_UK didnt drs do that?
@@41357500 It's a song...
Which one?
@@thhseeking eric
she talks about in-equality in terms of increased oxygen consumption enabling predation - Equality is not a concept applicable to this domain lol - it is applicable only to human social arrangements lol - Scientists eh, cant see whats in front of them...
Hardly - if one population develops a better method for absorbing or transporting oxygen their metabolic rate is no longer equal to another population: there's an inequality.
@@williamchamberlain2263 there is always an inequality - plants for example
@@Nick-kr7ne true, but if you're talking about C3 vs C4 photosynthesis there's a _distinct_ inequality in water efficiency of photosynthesis.
The sound quality I receive of this clip is unacceptable. Sorry, I must pass it by.
Sound's OK. Try another device, well worth listening to.
@@paulwallis7586 No, the sound really is quite bad. She deserves a better microphone.
great stuff, brillient stuff by a womwn too! (sarcasm). even in the garden the difference between anarobic an air robic fertilisers, . eg soil microbials them selves, a well worth topic for all gardeners yo delve into. . iff I may voice a thought or two those of plasma an also electrical universe ideas, interwoven into lifes structures as a whole! or at the time/s there of !? . as apposed to the linier elsculatar one an only anthropercentic revolutionary commodity big bang, an gravity view. . which just sucks in itself ! . .( technical exangilist reductionist + transhumanist pun intended). . tehehe zzzt next level (I robot...................quantum nano biologicle machine linier evolution. . exstinction.corps)
Could you please try to write in English as this makes no sense.
@@gswombat english is my 2nd language
@@paulgraystone4919 Then well done on the attempt. I speak a number of languages so I understand how difficult it is to gain mastery!
We believe what faith