Cause of the Cambrian Explosion is an article that argues for a combination of factors that lead to the mass growth in animal population 541 million years ago. According to Smith and Harper, scientists have been proposing hypotheses on the cause of this event since the dawn of science. Hypotheses range from explosions in space to “intrinsic genomic reorganization” and many others. Most current ideas fall into three categories. They propose that, “The rapid diversification of animals in the early Cambrian is likely to have been the result of a complex interplay of biotic and abiotic processes.” The rest of the article presents evidence for this statement. A focus was the emergence of Bilaterian animals and the food web that developed with
