many prominent paleontologists have sought to explain the Cambrian explosion as an artifact of our incomplete sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The lecture that my colleague heard that night in Oklahoma took a very different approach, giving the strong impression that the Precambrian fossil record actually does preserve the ancestral forms of the Cambrian animals and that the Ediacaran fauna, in particular, provide several striking examples of such forms. In public presentations about the Cambrian explosion, I’ve often encountered this claim, though usually in the form of an unfocused
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