Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

by Stephen C. Meyer

62 Yet during this time representatives of at least sixteen completely novel phyla and about thirty classes first appeared in the rock record. In a more recent paper using a slightly different dating scheme, Douglas Erwin and colleagues similarly show that thirteen new phyla appear in a roughly 6-million-year window.63 As we’ve seen, among these animal forms were the first trilobites, with their lens-focusing compound eyes among other complex anatomical features. The problem of explaining how so many new forms and structures arose so rapidly in the first explosive period of the Cambrian remains, whether or not one decides to include within the designation “Cambrian explosion” other distinct events (see Part Two).