Jay Novella

So some trace fossils rely on the creature's interaction with a soft environment, like the classic footprint, right?

So if there's mud or sand or sediment, it leaves impressions, and then that material later hardens.

So that's what we're talking about here.

The researchers here used this specific type of trace fossils, movement trails that the organisms left behind as they're exploring and feeding on the ancient seafloors of the Earth.

Now, remember that many of these organisms, they had relatively new abilities.

They had body plans and complexities that they really didn't have for that long, geologically speaking.

Now, they weren't the first organisms to sense anything, right?

Even microbes can sense chemicals.

But what they're working with here is evidence of animals expanding their sensory bubble, right, and using that information to navigate.

So that's kind of the crux of what they're doing here.

So Dr. Zekun Wang, who led the research, said, if an animal has a limited ability to sense its environment, it only gets information discontinuously.

This means that it only finds resources when they stumble across it by random chance, so the tracks they leave are normally long and aimless.

So imagine Jay forgetting his glasses, wandering around randomly looking for meatballs.

That gives you an idea.

That's not uncommon.

The kind of tracks that, you know, the paths that Jay would take.

So the scientists analyzed and modeled these trails.

There's hundreds of them that we've had all over the world.

We've got examples of these trails, and they inferred from the pattern of movements that

By analyzing the squiggles and how they moved and changed direction, it came back upon itself.