Chapter 19

THE CAMBRIAN

THE PALEOZOIC ERA. The second volume of the geological record, called the Paleozoic (Greek, PALAIOS, ancient; ZOE, life), has come down to us far less mutilated and defaced than has the first volume, which contains the traces of the most ancient life of the globe. Fossils are far more abundant in the Paleozoic than in the earlier strata, while the sediments in which they were entombed have suffered far less from metamorphism and other causes, and have been less widely buried from view, than the strata of the pre-Cambrian groups. By means of their fossils we can correlate the formations of widely separated regions from the beginning of the Paleozoic on, and can therefore trace some outline of the history of the continents.

Paleozoic time, although shorter than the pre-Cambrian as measured by the thickness of the strata, must still be reckoned in millions of years. During this vast reach of time the changes in organisms were very great. It is according to the successive stages in the advance of life that the Paleozoic formations are arranged in five systems,--the CAMBRIAN, the ORDOVICIAN, the SILURIAN, the DEVONIAN, and the CARBONIFEROUS. On the same basis the first three systems are grouped together as the older Paleozoic, because they alike are characterized by the dominance of the invertebrates; while the last two systems are united in the later Paleozoic, and are characterized, the one by the dominance of fishes, and the other by the appearance of amphibians and reptiles.

Each of these systems is world-wide in its distribution, and may be recognized on any continent by its own peculiar fauna. The names first given them in Great Britain have therefore come into general use, while their subdivisions, which often cannot be correlated in different countries and different regions, are usually given local names.

The first three systems were named from the fact that their strata are well displayed in Wales. The Cambrian carries the Roman name of Wales, and the Ordovician and Silurian the names of tribes of ancient Britons which inhabited the same country. The Devonian is named from the English county Devon, where its rocks were early studied. The Carboniferous was so called from the large amount of coal which it was found to contain in Great Britain and continental Europe.

THE CAMBRIAN

DISTRIBUTION OF STRATA. The Cambrian rocks outcrop in narrow belts about the pre-Cambrian areas of eastern Canada and the Lake Superior region, the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains. Strips of Cambrian formations occupy troughs in the pre-Cambrian rocks of New England and the maritime provinces of Canada; a long belt borders on the west the crystalline rocks of the Blue Ridge; and on the opposite side of the continent the Cambrian reappears in the mountains of the Great Basin and the Canadian Rockies. In the Mississippi valley it is exposed in small districts where uplift has permitted the stripping off of younger rocks. Although the areas of outcrop are small, we may infer that Cambrian rocks were widely deposited over the continent of North America.

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. The Cambrian system of North America comprises three distinct series, the LOWER CAMBRIAN, the MIDDLE CAMBRIAN, and the UPPER CAMBRIAN, each of which is characterized by its own peculiar fauna. In sketching the outlines of the continent as it was at the beginning of the Paleozoic, it must be remembered that wherever the Lower Cambrian formations now are found was certainly then sea bottom, and wherever the Lower Cambrian are wanting, and the next formations rest directly on pre-Cambrian rocks, was probably then land.

EARLY CAMBRIAN GEOGRAPHY. In this way we know that at the opening of the Cambrian two long, narrow mediterranean seas stretched from north to south across the continent. The eastern sea extended from the Gulf of St. Lawrence down the Champlain-Hudson valley and thence along the western base of the Blue Ridge south at least to Alabama. The western sea stretched from the Canadian Rockies over the Great Basin and at least as far south as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in Arizona.

Between these mediterraneans lay a great central land which included the pre-Cambrian U-shaped area of the Laurentian peneplain, and probably extended southward to the latitude of New Orleans. To the east lay a land which we may designate as APPALACHIA, whose western shore line was drawn along the site of the present Blue Ridge, but whose other limits are quite unknown. The land of Appalachia must have been large, for it furnished a great amount of waste during the entire Paleozoic era, and its eastern coast may possibly have lain even beyond the edge of the present continental shelf. On the western side of the continent a narrow land occupied the site of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Thus, even at the beginning of the Paleozoic, the continental plateau of North America had already been left by crustal movements in relief above the abysses of the great oceans on either side. The mediterraneans which lay upon it were shallow, as their sediments prove. They were EPICONTINENTAL SEAS; that is, they rested UPON (Greek, EPI) the submerged portion of the continental plateau. We have no proof that the deep ocean ever occupied any part of where North America now is.

The Middle and Upper Cambrian strata are found together with the Lower Cambrian over the area of both the eastern and the western mediterraneans, so that here the sea continued during the entire period. The sediments throughout are those of shoal water. Coarse cross-bedded sandstones record the action of strong shifting currents which spread coarse waste near shore and winnowed it of finer stuff. Frequent ripple marks on the bedding planes of the strata prove that the loose sands of the sea floor were near enough to the surface to be agitated by waves and tidal currents. Sun cracks show that often the outgoing tide exposed large muddy flats to the drying action of the sun. The fossils, also, of the strata are of kinds related to those which now live in shallow waters near the shore.

The sediments which gathered in the mediterranean seas were very thick, reaching in places the enormous depth of ten thousand feet. Hence the bottoms of these seas were sinking troughs, ever filling with waste from the adjacent land as fast as they subsided.

LATE CAMBRIAN GEOGRAPHY. The formations of the Middle and Upper Cambrian are found resting unconformably on the pre-Cambrian rocks from New York westward into Minnesota and at various points in the interior, as in Missouri and in Texas. Hence after earlier Cambrian time the central land subsided, with much the same effect as if the Mississippi valley were now to lower gradually, and the Gulf of Mexico to spread northward until it entered Lake Superior. The Cambrian seas transgressed the central land and strewed far and wide behind their advancing beaches the sediments of the later Cambrian upon an eroded surface of pre-Cambrian rocks.

The succession of the Cambrian formations in North America records many minor oscillations and varying conditions of physical geography; yet on the whole it tells of widening seas and lowering lands. Basal conglomerates and coarse sandstones which must have been laid near shore are succeeded by shaly sandstones, sandy shales, and shales. Toward the top of the series heavy beds of limestone, extending from the Blue Ridge to Missouri, speak of clear water, and either of more distant shores or of neighboring lands which were worn or sunk so low that for the most part their waste was carried to the sea in solution.

In brief, the Cambrian was a period of submergence. It began with the larger part of North America emerged as great land masses. It closed with most of the interior of the continental plateau covered with a shallow sea.

THE LIFE OF THE CAMBRIAN PERIOD

It is now for the first time that we find preserved in the offshore deposits of the Cambrian seas enough remains of animal life to be properly called a fauna. Doubtless these remains are only the most fragmentary representation of the life of the time, for the Cambrian rocks are very old and have been widely metamorphosed. Yet the five hundred and more species already discovered embrace all the leading types of invertebrate life, and are so varied that we must believe that their lines of descent stretch far back into the pre-Cambrian past.

PLANTS. No remains of plants have been found in Cambrian strata, except some doubtful markings, as of seaweed.

SPONGES. The sponges, the lowest of the multicellular animals, were represented by several orders. Their fossils are recognized by the siliceous spicules, which, as in modern sponges, either were scattered through a mass of horny fibers or were connected in a flinty framework.

COELENTERATES. This subkingdom includes two classes of interest to the geologist,--the HYDROZOA, such as the fresh-water hydra and the jellyfish, and the CORALS. Both classes existed in the Cambrian.

The Hydrozoa were represented not only by jellyfish but also by the GRAPTOLITE, which takes its name from a fancied resemblance of some of its forms to a quill pen. It was a composite animal with a horny framework, the individuals of the colony living in cells strung on one or both sides along a hollow stem, and communicating by means of a common flesh in this central tube. Some graptolites were straight, and some curved or spiral; some were single stemmed, and others consisted of several radial stems united. Graptolites occur but rarely in the Upper Cambrian. In the Ordovician and Silurian they are very plentiful, and at the close of the Silurian they pass out of existence, never to return.

CORALS are very rarely found in the Cambrian, and the description of their primitive types is postponed to later chapters treating of periods when they became more numerous.

ECHINODERMS. This subkingdom comprises at present such familiar forms as the crinoid, the starfish, and the sea urchin. The structure of echinoderms is radiate. Their integument is hardened with plates or particles of carbonate of lime.

Of the free echinoderms, such as the starfish and the sea urchin, the former has been found in the Cambrian rocks of Europe, but neither have so far been discovered in the strata of this period in North America. The stemmed and lower division of the echinoderms was represented by a primitive type, the CYSTOID, so called from its saclike form, A small globular or ovate "calyx" of calcareous plates, with an aperture at the top for the mouth, inclosed the body of the animal, and was attached to the sea bottom by a short flexible stalk consisting of disks of carbonate of lime held together by a central ligament.

ARTHOPODS. These segmented animals with "jointed feet," as their name suggests, may be divided in a general way into water breathers and air breathers. The first-named and lower division comprises the class of the CRUSTACEA,--arthropods protected by a hard exterior skeleton, or "crust,"--of which crabs, crayfish, and lobsters are familiar examples. The higher division, that of the air breathers, includes the following classes: spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and insects.

THE TRILOBITE. The aquatic arthropods, the Crustacea, culminated before the air breathers; and while none of the latter are found in the Cambrian, the former were the dominant life of the time in numbers, in size, and in the variety of their forms. The leading crustacean type is the TRILOBITE, which takes its name from the three lobes into which its shell is divided longitudinally. There are also three cross divisions,--the head shield, the tail shield, and between the two the thorax, consisting of a number of distinct and unconsolidated segments. The head shield carries a pair of large, crescentic, compound eyes, like those of the insect. The eye varies greatly in the number of its lenses, ranging from fourteen in some species to fifteen thousand in others. Figure 268, C, is a restoration of the trilobite, and shows the appendages, which are found preserved only in the rarest cases.

During the long ages of the Cambrian the trilobite varied greatly. Again and again new species and genera appeared, while the older types became extinct. For this reason and because of their abundance, trilobites are used in the classification of the Cambrian system. The Lower Cambrian is characterized by the presence of a trilobitic fauna in which the genus Olenellus is predominant. This, the OLENELLUS ZONE, is one of the most important platforms in the entire geological series; for, the world over, it marks the beginning of Paleozoic time, while all underlying strata are classified as pre-Cambrian. The Middle Cambrian is marked by the genus Paradoxides, and the Upper Cambrian by the genus Olenus. Some of the Cambrian trilobites were giants, measuring as much as two feet long, while others were the smallest of their kind, a fraction of an inch in length.

Another type of crustacean which lived in the Cambrian and whose order is still living is illustrated in Figure 269.

WORMS. Trails and burrows of worms have been left on the sea beaches and mud flats of all geological times from the Algonkian to the present.

BRACHIOPODS. These soft-bodied animals, with bivalve shells and two interior armlike processes which served for breathing, appeared in the Algonkian, and had now become very abundant. The two valves of the brachiopod shell are unequal in size, and in each valve a line drawn from the beak to the base divides the valve into two equal parts. It may thus be told from the pelecypod mollusk, such as the clam, whose two valves are not far from equal in size, each being divided into unequal parts by a line dropped from the beak.

Brachiopods include two orders. In the most primitive order--that of the INARTICULATE brachiopods--the two valves are held together only by muscles of the animal, and the shell is horny or is composed of phosphate of lime. The DISCINA, which began in the Algonkian, is of this type, as is also the LINGULELLA of the Cambrian. Both of these genera have lived on during the millions of years of geological time since their introduction, handing down from generation to generation with hardly any change to their descendants now living off our shores the characters impressed upon them at the beginning.

The more highly organized ARTICULATE brachiopods have valves of carbonate of lime more securely joined by a hinge with teeth and sockets (Fig. 270). In the Cambrian the inarticulates predominate, though the articulates grow common toward the end of the period.

MOLLUSKS. The three chief classes of mollusks--the PELECYPODS (represented by the oyster and clam of to-day), the GASTROPODS (represented now by snails, conches, and periwinkles), and the CEPHALOPODS (such as the nautilus, cuttlefish, and squids)--were all represented in the Cambrian, although very sparingly.

Pteropods, a suborder of the gastropods, appeared in this age. Their papery shells of carbonate of lime are found in great numbers from this time on.

Cephalopods, the most highly organized of the mollusks, started into existence, so far as the record shows, toward, the end of the Cambrian, with the long extinct ORTHOCERAS (STRAIGHTHORN) and the allied genera of its family. The Orthoceras had a long, straight, and tapering shell, divided by cross partitions into chambers. The animal lived in the "body chamber" at the larger end, and walled off the other chambers from it in succession during the growth of the shell. A central tube, the SIPHUNCLE, passed through from the body chamber to the closed tip of the cone.

The seashells, both brachiopods and mollusks, are in some respects the most important to the geologist of all fossils. They have been so numerous, so widely distributed, and so well preserved because of their durable shells and their station in growing sediments, that better than any other group of organisms they can be used to correlate the strata of different regions and to mark by their slow changes the advance of geological time.

CLIMATE. The life of Cambrian times in different countries contains no suggestion of any marked climatic zones, and as in later periods a warm climate probably reached to the polar regions.