Here you will find intriguing extras: segments our producers weren't able to fit into a five-minute podcast as well as images, interesting facts and ways to get involved or in touch with biodiversity wherever you live.
Advent of Complex Life website to learn more about the environmental, ecological and genetic factors that lead to the evolution of complex life on earth. This project is part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Images
View photos from Ari’s trip to Mistaken Point in Newfoundland.
Photo Credit: Ari Daniel Shapiro
See a gallery of Ediacaran fossils at the
Advent of Complex LifeDesk. LifeDesks are web environments that allow scientists to share biodiversity research and collaborate on classification—especially important with organisms as poorly understood at the Ediacaran fauna. You can learn more about the LifeDesks project and the EOL partner behind them at LifeDesks.org.
Can’t get enough of the Precambrian? Listen to our
earlier podcast about the Ediacaran fauna. Facts
Trepassia wardae is named for its discoverer, Kit Ward’s son, Bradley. In 1956, on the other side of the Atlantic, a British teenager discovered a fossil of a different Precambrian creature called Charnia. (You can read Tina Negus’s account of her find here.) Charnia is found at Mistaken Point alongside Trepassia. Because central England and Newfoundland once were neighbors during the late Precambrian, Charnia is represented in fossil deposits on both sides of the ocean.
Other fossils known from Mistaken Point include frondlike animals from the genus
Fractofusus and Thectardis, a cone-shaped mat-sticker, so-called because it stuck to the mat of microbes that covered the sea floor during the Precambrian.
Disk-shaped depressions visible in the fossil beds of Mistaken Point may represent holdfasts that allowed animals like Trepassia to grip the ancient seabed. Living animals that use holdfasts include
feather stars, kelp and other algae, sea fans, and sponges.