"Settled Science" and the Cambrian Explosion -- Geologists Weigh In

Yesterday we considered the "settled science" explaining the Cambrian explosion in light of one of two new papers in the Geological Society of America Bulletin. In the second paper, also by geologists from Harvard (Smith et al., with Francis A. MacDonald participating in both papers), we travel to Mongolia.

Until the 1990s, large regions of outcrops that cross the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary were inaccessible to Western scientists. The Harvard team performed an extensive mapping of the area...