Life of the Oceans - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 152

fig. 16. The exceptionally preserved arthropod Fuxianhuia from the early
Cambrian rocks of Chengjiang County, Yunnan Province, south China. Up to 11
centimetres long, this animal was probably a predator.
Among the bottom dwellers are predators, feeding on the tiny bra-
doriids: we know this for certain, because we find fragments of
bradoriids preserved in their fossilized guts. A few Chengjiang
animals—the jellyfish and some of the arthropods—suggest that the
water column was being colonized. This colonization of every level of
the water column was to have profound implications for the develop-
ment of life through the Phanerozoic. Fast food—as we shall see—
was on the way.
These early Cambrian ecosystems were not only complex; they
varied across the world. In the equally celebrated Cambrian fossil