Henry Gee

They're these Ediacaran creatures called rangomorphs.

which look like plaited loaves.

And some of them seem to have little smaller plaited loaves around them.

They grew like strawberry plants by shooting out runners and grew baby ones.

These are mostly known from Newfoundland.

Now, people have split up the Ediacaran into various sub-stages.

The earliest one part is found in Newfoundland and I think probably Leicestershire, but the later part is in Namibia and also on the White Sea where you see signs of things that look a bit like mollusks, in other words, more modern animals.

So there were signs of animal life happening just before the Ediacaran period finished and before the Cambrian Explosion.

Yes, it was hard to know what the ecology was like, but there doesn't seem to have been any predation as far as we can see.

Nobody knows how they lived.

Maybe they had symbiotic algae like corals do today.

So, it's a huge amount of unanswered questions about how the Ediacaran lived.

And people think, you know, it was a kind of blissful time of things just getting on.

But I'm sure that a lot of the animals were probably slurping up even smaller things that don't appear in the fossil record.

like larvae or bacteria or tiny eukaryotic cells, because even though multicellular creatures had evolved, there were still, as there are now, lots of single-celled creatures around.

So there was probably a lot of filter feeding and deposit feeding, but nothing chasing each other with nasty long pointy teeth.

But that's...

Well, there are lots of different theories and they're probably all connected.

One is that

that sponges had evolved.