First Animals on Earth . . . Found in Australia

First Animals on Earth. . . found in Australia

The first animals were in the Ediacaran Period of the Precambrian Era.  I recently listened to a book by Bill Bryson called In A Sunburned Country.  It is a book about Australia.  He tells a story about a geologist who was in the Australian Outback.  This geologist climbed a bit onto a cliff to get shade to eat his lunch.  There he found fossils of the first animals.  This type of fortunate discovery is an example of serendipity.  The geologists was named Reginald Sprigg and he was in the South Flinders Range of mountains.  

The "leaves" you are seeing in the drawing are actually NOT leaves.  They are not even plants.  They do look like leaves but they are an animal called Charnia.   Charnia fossils were the first fossilized animals to be identified as from the Pre-Cambrian Era.  The rounder flat animal is called a Dickinsonia.   It had no mouth.  It appears to have secreted digestive juices (acid) on the bacteria mats on the sea floor and absorbed the bacteria nutrients.  Some of the other animals you see include sponges and jellyfish.  Some of these very early animals of the Ediacaran Period would go on into the Paleozoic Era and some (like sponges and jellyfish) have descendants stillin the oceans today. 

Back then, around 600 million years ago, there was no life on land at all.  But the seas had begun to teem with animal life. . . or Kingdom:  Animalia.   It appears that many of these animals were filtier feeders who ate plankton.  The plankton could be from Kingdom:  Protista, or Kingdom:  Eubacteria.  The earliest form of life appears to have been a type of bacteria called Archaebacteria.  Then the Eubacteria appeared, then the Protists.  Animals appeared next.  Somewhere in there the fungi or Kingdom:  Fungi evolved too.

So many know about the Cambrian Explosion of life. . . seen in the Burgess Shale at Yoho National Park in Canada.  But now we know that there appears to have been a Precambrian Explosion as well.

We are going to Australia in a couple of weeks or so.  So we want to see the Australian fossils of these early animals of the Precambrian Explosion. . . They are in the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.   

NOTE:  Remember that the printable version of this is found by clicking on the buttons labeled either Paleontology. . . . . or . . . . All Printables.      Newer drawings are at the bottom of the correct list.  There are sub-lists in the Paleontology page. . . and I had to add "Animals of the Pre-Cambrian."