Henry Gee

Well, before Pangaea, the supercontinent before that was called Rodinia.

Rodinia.

And that started to break up about 800 million years ago.

And as a consequence of that, there were...

two or three snowball earth episodes where they were ice ages so severe that they covered the whole of the earth.

Now, just before the great oxidation event, there was another of these snowball earth events, which was even more severe, but that was so long ago, we don't need to worry about it.

But

Partly to do with the Snowball Earth events, animal life appeared.

And these were large enough to see with the naked eye.

But the first flush of animal life was very strange.

And this was before the Cambrian.

These were the Ediacaran fauna.

Now, a fellow, I think his name was Spriggs in Australia, discovered the Ediacaran fauna in South Australia in some sandstone fields.

very, very coarse impressions of things that look like jellyfish and other things, squashy sea creatures that were very hard to assign to any particular group of animals.

They have been thought to be lichens.

They have been thought to be their own thing, some strange creature.

Some have been tentatively associated with modern groups of animals.

But since then, Ediacaran faunas have been found in

all sorts of exotic locations from the White Sea coast of Russia to Namibia to Newfoundland to Bradgate Park near Leicester.

Brilliant.