Dr. Steven Novella

But that, to me, is very surprising that there were chordates in the Ediacaran fossils.

I would not have guessed that.

Well, it was right before the Cambrian.

We said this was for the transition.

This was right before.

But this has been the trend, and this kind of makes sense that the more of these Ediacaran assemblages that we find and more of these windows that we find into this era of time, the more things are getting pushed back.

So it does seem like pretty much all of the Cambrian groups, like the phyla, probably existed in the Ediacaran period, but they hadn't evolved their hard parts yet.

But they were all there.

They didn't come out of nowhere or evolve from non-multicellular creatures or whatever in the Cambrian.

Not that there were no new groups in the Cambrian, but most of the groups that we're finding more and more groups do, yeah, they do have their antecedents in the Ediacaran fossils.

So when I first started following this story 40 years ago—

We didn't know.

And now there's a lot of evidence that, yes, their roots do go back to the Ediacaran fossils.

And the only reason why we didn't find them earlier is because they don't have hard parts that more easily fossilize.

Evolutionarily speaking.

I mean, these were all really, really cool items that I wanted to talk about, and the science or fiction aspect of it was secondary.

You got it.

As our grandmother would say, God bless him.

God bless him.

All right, well, thank... He's 90, by the way.