Cambrian explosion
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The Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation was an event approximately 541 million years ago in the Cambrian period when practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record. It lasted for about 13 – 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla.
One of the lasting records of the Cambrian is the Burgess Shale wherein some kind of catastrophic mudslide buried a bunch of “intermediate”, transitional organisms — though we dare say they didn't think of themselves as intermediate — preserving and then fossilising them and their soft tissue, to the great advantage of paleontology, when otherwise they might have been lost to posterity altogether.
Writing about the Burgess Shale, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin invented the concept of “punctuated equilibrium” sparking one of the great modern debates about the nature of evolution by natural selection.
Apparently, there a Cambrianesque explosion going on for legal eagles at the moment, rendered in silicon and not carbon, and it is going to put us all out of work. This is nonsense.