🌍 Before the "origin", an ancient and structured strange life had already conquered Earth

Elaborate life could be much older on Earth than previously thought.

A team of researchers has uncovered a fossil site in Yunnan province, southwestern China, where over seven hundred specimens dating from 554 to 539 million years ago have been collected. These fossils, from the Jiangchuan biota, reveal a surprisingly diverse ecosystem with new species and organisms previously thought to be reserved for the Cambrian period.

The presence of deuterostomes, a group including modern vertebrates, among these remains indicates an older origin for these animals. Even older than what is considered the origin of complex life on Earth, which is usually called the "Cambrian explosion".


The specimens include ancient relatives of starfish and worms, showing advanced feeding adaptations and unusual body shapes. Some fossils display tentacles, stems, and structures that do not match any known species, suggesting a transitional community between the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. This diversity helps fill a gap in evolutionary history, confirming that advanced animals thrived before the Cambrian explosion.

The exceptional preservation of these fossils, as carbon films, allows the observation of fine anatomical details such as digestive systems and mobile structures. Unlike typical Ediacaran sites where organisms are simple impressions, the preservation at this site, similar to that of the Burgess Shale, offers insight into biology. According to scientists, this extremely rare preservation could explain why such animals had not been detected before.

This discovery is the result of nearly ten years of field work, conducted by researchers from Yunnan University and Oxford. The results, published in Science, provide strong evidence for an earlier animal diversification than expected.


The implications of these fossils extend beyond mere chronology, explaining how animal communities evolved in the late Ediacaran. This advance opens a new research path on the mechanisms that led to the emergence of elaborate life on Earth.

The Ediacaran period and its ecosystems

The Ediacaran period, spanning from about 635 to 541 million years before our era, is a geological era often perceived as dominated by simple organisms. It directly precedes the Cambrian explosion, an event marked by the rapid appearance of many animals with advanced biological organization. For a long time, fossils from this era were mainly blurry impressions in rock, making it difficult to identify life forms.

Ediacaran ecosystems were characterized by creatures with strange morphologies, such as rangeomorphs and tribrachiids, which resemble no modern animal. These organisms lived anchored to the seafloor, filtering nutrients or capturing food with specialized structures. Their lifestyle and biology remain subjects of debate among paleontologists.


Understanding the Ediacaran helps grasp how environmental conditions, such as oxygen levels or climate changes, influenced evolution.