I joked in one of my books that I felt as if I ought to put a safety helmet on before writing about the Cambrian period, but it did actually feel a bit like that.

我在一本书里开玩笑说，我觉得在写到寒武纪的事前应当先戴个安全帽，不过我就是有点儿这样的感觉。”

This then enabled the rise of carnivores, which in turn spurred a productive arms race, resulting in what's known as the Cambrian explosion.

这就促成了食肉动物的出，它们激起了一场繁殖力的竞赛，最变为我们所知的寒武纪大爆。

He told the Associated Press it is believed that " … modern animal groups like jellyfish appeared 540 million years ago in the Cambrian explosion."

他告诉美联社，据信“… … 诸如水母类的代动物群体出在5。4亿年前的寒武纪大爆期间。”

Seaweeds, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance a few million years before the Cambrian begins.

海藻、类似水母的生物、海绵生物和奇怪的虫子确实在寒武纪开始的前几百万年已经出。

It's as if, at one instant in this time we call the Cambrian Era, complex multi-cellular life suddenly emerged almost intact on the planet.

在寒武纪的一段很短的时间里，各种复杂的多细胞生物突然横空出世。

But some might be the ancestors of the Cambrian megafauna.

但是他们中的一些可能就是寒武纪大型动物的祖先。

There, 8,000 feet above sea level, he found a shale outcrop, about the length of a city block, containing an unrivaled array of fossils from soon after the moment when complex life burst forth in dazzling profusion-the famous Cambrian explosion.

在海拔2438米的地方。他了一个页岩露头，长度大约相当于城市的一个街区，里面蕴藏着一大批化石，远自复杂生命大爆爱——即著名的寒武纪大爆——不久的时候。

Unconformities are places where rocks have been eroded before new ones are deposited, and the widespread Ediacaran-Cambrian unconformity has been a big obstacle to understanding the Cambrian explosion.

不整合面地方的石块在新的沉积前已经被侵蚀，埃迪卡拉纪-寒武纪间广泛的不整合面是了解寒武纪大爆的一个重大障碍。

The fall of the Ediacaran fauna was followed by the creative outburst of the Cambrian period.

埃迪亚卡拉动物群的没落是寒武纪的创造性爆。

Most ambitiously, Dr Zhu, Dr Xiao and their colleagues hope to drill right through several fossiliferous sites in southern China where Ediacaran rocks turn seamlessly into Cambrian ones.

朱博士，肖博士以及他们的团队很有雄心的希望在中国南部那些无缝连接埃迪卡拉纪和寒武纪的几个含有化石的地方穿凿而过。

In the context of the Cambrian, explosion would soon have more to do with modern tempers than ancient physiological facts.

联系到寒武纪的氛围，“爆”很快跟代人的脾气，而不是跟古代生理上的事实更有关系。

On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian.

按照这个比例，据约翰·麦克菲在《海洋和山脉》一书中说，一只手的指尖到另一只手的手腕间的距离代表寒武纪以前的年代。

In fact, the record as it existed then (and for a long time afterward) showed no life at all right up to the moment of the famous Cambrian explosion.

其实，当时（及以很多年）已的化石表明，一直到著名的寒武纪大爆前，地球上根本没有任何生命。

The schoolboy turned it in to a paleontologist at the University of Leicester, who identified it at once as Precambrian.

那位小学生把化石交给了莱斯特大学的一位古生物学家。他马上认出那是寒武纪前的东西。

Something similar happened with all those Cambrian creatures that paleontologists thought were long gone.

类似的情况也生在那些被认为早已消失的寒武纪生物身上。

For instance, it cannot be doubted that all the Cambrian and Silurian trilobites are descended from some one crustacean, which must have lived long before the Cambrian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal.

例如，毫无疑问，所有的寒武纪和志留纪三叶虫都是某种甲壳类动物的代，这种甲壳类动物一定生活在寒武纪前很久， 而且可能与任何已知动物都大不相同。

Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which had never changed.

在他数以百万计的祖先中，追溯到寒武纪的软体动物，每个人都可能在真理的幻觉中生死存亡，而这种幻觉并没有使他感到有趣，而且从未改变过。

I think we are about to see the Cambrian explosion of software, the same way that with the web, there's the Cambrian explosion of news sources, with Substack and Twitter.

我认为我们即将见证软件领域的寒武纪大爆，就像互联网时代催生了Substack和Twitter等新闻源的繁荣一样。

I used to talk about the sort of expectation of this like Cambrian explosion of languages because this is what happened in the early days of classical computing, right?

我曾谈到对语言领域类似寒武纪大爆的预期， 因为在经典计算的早期阶段就生了这种情况，对吧？

Life on earth has existed for 4 billion  years, mostly as single celled organisms until some 540 million years ago the Cambrian  explosion heralded the age of animals.

地球上的生命已经存在了40亿年，大多数时候都是单细胞生物，直到大约5.4亿年前的寒武纪大爆才迎来了动物的时代。