Ann Jones

So here we are.

This chapter book from the school library has just got very interesting and very well-thumbed at the bit where the characters are starting to have sex.

It only took 3.9 billion years for the Earth to come of age.

which is just 600 million years ago.

But these very first animals, the rangiomorphs, only seem to last for a little while, evolutionary speaking, because something is coming.

No pun intended.

But it was an explosion.

Sounds important.

It's like spring blossom season on the tree of life.

Little twigs are appearing all over the shop, flowering with eyes and gills.

There's trilobites, shrimpy things, eely things, skeletons, proboscises, and even newfangled things like predators.

It's what I can only call evolution's ejaculation.

Marisa Betts is a geologist and paleontologist.

So perhaps along with all these innovations, we get the latest in lovemaking technology brought to you by the Cambrian explosion.

OK, new organisms, but same old, same old reproductive strategy.

Wow.

And I do sound impressed because this is a key moment in the history of reproduction.

Let me explain.

The internal eggs could mark a potential split between strategies to have babies.

On one hand, you have lots of babies, but you don't worry about them at all.