To better understand how deep ocean conditions may have impacted Ediacaran fauna, the researchers exposed a modern-day animal analog, the sea anemone, to a gradient of temperature and oxygen levels.

They are pinnacle reefs, built by cyanobacteria on the shallow sea floor 543 million years ago, during a time known as the Ediacaran period. The ancient world occupied by these reefs was truly alien.

Earth's earliest animals were strange sea creatures "Rather than first appearing in the Cambrian period as had once been thought, animals must have originated and begun to diversify by the ...

Fossils of feathery-looking sea creatures that formed prehistoric animal communities give clues to the 'Cambrian explosion' of evolution.

A volcanic eruption around 579 million years ago buried a 'nursery' of the earliest-known animals under a Pompeii-like deluge of ash, preserving them as fossils in rocks in Newfoundland, new ...

These creatures from the Ediacaran Period, roughly 550 million years ago, are strangely shaped soft-bodied animals that lived in the sea. Researchers have long considered them enigmatic.

All Humans Carry Crucial Genes From 'Sea Monsters' That Lived 500 Million ... leaves, teardrops, and twisted ropes drifting across the seafloor. In the foreign landscape of the Ediacaran Period, ...

If Retallack is correct, it means that Ediacaran fossils represent an independent branch on the tree of life, and that life on land during this time may have been more complex than life in the sea.

The 700–1,300 feet-wide space rock deformed rocks more than six miles from the impact site when it hit 600 million years ago.

These creatures from the Ediacaran Period, roughly 550 million years ago, are strangely shaped soft-bodied animals that lived in the sea. Researchers have long considered them enigmatic.