Phlesch Bubble: The Cambrian Sea animation

Phlesch Bubble produced a dramatic three-screen animation of the Cambrian sea for the Field Museum in Chicago.
Click here to view a 35MB Quicktime of some of the highlights.

The animation is a 5 minute loop, projected on an enormous 7' x 35' screen, covering a 140 degree panorama. It is the central display in the Cambrian section of the museum's new permanent exhibit, Evolving Planet, a walk-through history of life on Earth.

The Cambrian era was around 530 million years ago. It was the 'big bang' of complex life on earth. Although life had existed for at least one billion years previous to this era, the diversity of life explodes in the Cambrian fossil record, which contains nearly every animal phylum that currently exists, along with a few that have since become extinct.

Collaborating closely with palaeontologists and zoologists, we painstakingly reconstructed thirty-one animals and plants from the fossil evidence and recreated their motion and behaviours based on intensive study of similar modern organisms. These creatures might look like figments of our imaginations, but these images represent the most current palaeontological reconstructions of what life in Earth's oceans probably looked like during the Cambrian.