Tag: Precambrian
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“I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It Before” – Unusual 550-Million-Year-Old Fossil Solves Paleontological Paradox
SciTechDaily has an interesting story about some of the earliest sponges. New research in the journal Nature suggests the earliest sponges did not have a mineral skeleton. Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and his collaborators described an Ediacaran (550 million years old) sponge that had not evolved the ability to generate the hard needle-like structures,…
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PBS Eons: Animals Might Be Much Older Than We Thought
PBS Eons has a new episode. This interesting video is about the origin of complex life. When did animals first show up? How long before the Cambian Explosion did complex life arrive on Earth. What are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their…
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PBS Eons: These Fossils Were Supposed To Be Impossible
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the earliest animals, which evolved during a period of the Pre-Cambrian called the Ediacaran. Hidden in rocks once thought too old to contain complex life we may have found the animal kingdom’s oldest known predator.
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PBS Eons: How We Identified One of Earth’s Earliest Animals
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the oldest animals that dates back to the Precambrian during the Ediacaran. Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or something else. It turns out, the key to solving the puzzle of Precambrian…
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CBC Quirks & Quarks: Fungus fossils show the complexity of life a billion years ago
CBC Quirks & Quarks has a segment on the discovery of some fungus fossils. The fossils were found in shale in the Grassy Bay Formation in the Northwest Territories and dates to the Precambrian era about a billion years ago. All the details are a paper published in the journal Nature. Elizabeth Turner, a professor…
