Dr. Steven Novella

And so there are a lot of groups in the Ediacaran fossils that are now extinct that we only see in the Ediacaran.

So they did go extinct at that time.

They didn't make it into the Cambrian explosion.

But interestingly, also, I almost made this an item, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

The transition from Ediacaran fossils to Cambrian fossils, it seems like it involved developing from two-dimensional to three-dimensional living, right?

So Ediacaran fossils largely living in a two-dimensional world on the ocean floor.

And then once they started to look up and move and hunt in three dimensions, there was the explosion, right?

Anyway, that's one of the theories now.

Yeah, very interesting.

Well, no, they have some complete ones.

Or complete-ish.

Okay, number two, a review of fossil evidence shows that early eukaryotes, 1.75 to 1.4 billion years ago, were free-swimming organisms living mostly near the surface of the ocean.

You guys all think this one is science.

And this one is the fiction.

we all just kind of glossed over it this is a tricky one this is a tricky one it sounded sketchy but I couldn't figure out what was critically wrong with that doesn't sound sketchy to me at all it's interesting so the obviously eukaryotes are the type of creatures that went on to develop multicellular life right um

They were around for a billion years before the Cambrian explosion, right?

What were they doing for all of that time?

Just hanging out.

Biting their time.

Waiting.