Have you ever wondered what makes something an animal? The latest exhibition at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History aims to answer this question, taking us back 600 million years to the time of the Cambrian Explosion. This 20 million year period (a mere flash in the pan if you're thinking in geological terms) saw a sudden, massive increase in the number of new life forms on Earth, with the kind of body structures that we see in modern animals forming for the first time.

The exhibition showcases some fascinating fossils, including 55 unique specimens from the Chengjiang excavation site that are on loan from Yunnan University, leaving China for the first time. You'll see familiar favourites such as trilobites, as well as less well-known creatures like tiny placozoans (the earliest known animals) and plant-like charnia. I was particularly interested in the 'exceptionally preserved' fossils - fossils that have formed under such unique circumstances that soft tissues, as well as exoskeletons, can be seen. The exhibition did a brilliant job of breaking down how these animals formed, how they developed into a complex system of food webs, and what exactly made these creatures animals, despite (in many cases) looking more like ferns, puddles of goo, or even pineapples. I also loved the inclusion of some art amongst the science, in the form of the researchers' collaboration with the Oxford Printmakers' Collective, who had produced some original prints inspired by the collection. In one case, we learned, seeing the artistic interpretation of an early animal helped a researcher gain a fuller understanding of the specimen he was currently studying - a testament to how closely the arts and sciences interlink.

The highlight of the exhibition, though, has to be the Cambrian Dive Simulator. This ingenious interactive display lets you 'swim' around the ocean floor during the time of the Cambrian Explosion, finding early animals and learning about them and their modern-day counterparts. Kids (and adults) will have a wonderful time hunting down Amplectobelua or Vetulicola cuneata and finding out how these animals fitted into the earliest ecosystem.

The First Animals exhibition is running until February 2020, so make sure you take a trip to the museum and learn about some of our most distant ancestors. You'll be introduced to a world that seems alien, but is in fact the foundation for our own - life, but not as we know it.