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Author Topic:   The Cambrian Explosion - interesting radio show
CK
Member (Idle past 4128 days)
Posts: 3221
Joined: 07-04-2004


Message 1 of 1 (186102)
02-17-2005 4:39 AM


BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time
PROGRAMME DETAILS
Thursday 17 February 2005
Cambrian Explosion
THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION
In the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia in Canada, there is an outcrop of limestone shot through with a seam of fine dark shale. A sudden mudslide into shallow water some 550 million years ago means that a startling array of wonderful organisms has been preserved within it. Wide eyed creatures with tentacles below and spines on their backs, things like flattened rolls of carpet with a set of teeth at one end, squids with big lobster-like arms. There are thousands of them and they seem to testify to a time when evolution took a leap and life on this planet suddenly went from being small, simple and fairly rare to being large, complex, numerous and dizzyingly diverse. It happened in the Cambrian Period and it's known as the Cambrian Explosion.
But if this is the great crucible of life on Earth, what could have caused it? How do the strange creatures relate to life as we see it now? And what does the Cambrian Explosion tell us about the nature of evolution?
Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University
Richard Corfield, Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at the Open University
Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds
The link for "listen again" may currently take you to last week's show.
However I have put this thread up as a reminder to others to check in about four days when they put this show up on the site and catch a very interesting show! (you are a bit late to catch it live as it finishes in about four minutes gmt!)
While you wait:
BBC - Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Adventure Game
This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 17 February 2005 04:39 AM
This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 17 February 2005 04:42 AM

  
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