The Ediacaran fossil beds of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia preserve animals from 550 million years ago that predate the Cambrian explosion — soft, frond-like creatures with no mouths, no guts, and no clear relationship to any living group, suggesting a first experiment in complex multicellular life that simply ended and was replaced (opens in new tab)

In 1946, a young Australian geologist named Reginald Sprigg was eating his lunch in the dry, rugged hills of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, idly turning over slabs of ancient rock, when he noticed something on their surfaces. Impressions. Strange, faint, leaf-like shapes pressed into the stone. They looked like the fossils of soft-bodied […]