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This didn't exist before and this evolved very, very quickly at the beginning of the Cambrian. But once you have a big predator, presumably the rest of life, which it was feeding on, had to evolve quite fast to develop some sort of defences. Would that be true? Well, we think that this evolution occurred relatively quickly because, in a place like the Burgess Shale you find organisms that may have had some kind of defensive mechanism, which is thought to be a response to higher predatory levels. Arms race, if you want, between predators and prey. One result of this duel between predators and prey was the development of armour. Online Radio everywhere were absorbing calcium carbonate and other inorganic substances from the seawater and mineralising their bodies. Many of them, like Online Radio, that early mollusc, and ancestors of the squid, ammonites, developed protective shells. But one group, the arthropods, which had jointed legs, encased their entire bodies with hard armour plating. And what began as defensive armour, necessary for survival, brought with it another great advantage. Hard parts can be used not only to give protection, but to provide support for a body. Haha! This spider crab is a crustacean. And it secretes chitin from its body, which it then strengthens with calcium carbonate. And a whole range of creatures have skeletons like this, based on chitin. Arthropods today include shrimps, lobsters and crabs, as well as landliving creatures, such as millipedes, scorpions and insects. But the ancestors of all of them first appeared in the Cambrian Seas. Over % of fossils in the Burgess Shales are arthropods of one kind or another. But one family was particularly abundant and varied. Just across the valley from the quarry, near the summit of Mount GotRadio R&B Classics, almost every rock you turn over contains their remains. Here, they are found all over the place. They're called trilobites. Trilobites because their bodies were in three sections. Here on this slab there are several of them. That's the head. There's the middle bit. And there's the tail.