567-million-year-old fossils rewrite the dawn of animal life
Fossils discovered in Canada's Northwest Territories suggest that complex animal life, including movement and sexual reproduction, began 5-10 million years earlier than previously thought. These 567-million-year-old specimens provide new insights into the Ediacaran period and the evolution of multicellular organisms.
Why it matters
This discovery forces a re-evaluation of the timeline of early animal evolution and the environmental conditions that allowed complex life to emerge.
Researchers have discovered an unusually rich fossil site in a remote region of Canada's Northwest Territories, revealing new details about some of the earliest complex animals on Earth. The fossils belong to the Ediacaran biota, a collection of mostly soft-bodied organisms that lived on ancient seafloors more than 500 million years ago.
Some specimens appear to be about 567 million years old. Their age suggests that animal movement and sexual reproduction began 5-10 million years earlier than previous evidence indicated. The study, led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and Dartmouth, was published in Science Advances.
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