The Ediacaran is the last geological period of the Precambrian era, spanning between 635 and 539 million years ago. It is also the period in which the oldest known forms of multicellular life lived. The name derives from Ediacara, the Australian locality that has yielded the best preserved fossils from this era. These are imprints of strange soft-bodied organism of various sizes. Some have the appearance of jellyfish in the shape of a disk, others are similar to ‘fronds’, and many resemble pipes, sacks, feathers and even quilted mattresses. These fossils are difficult to interpret, and indeed it is hard to know with any certainty whether they had more affinities with the animal or the plant world. These strange organisms, which became (either largely or completely) extinct by the end of the Precambrian, may represent a ‘failed experiment’ of evolution or be the progenitors of many taxonomic groups that evolved in the Cambrian period.
