A collaborative study by researchers from the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History and Oxford’s Department of Earth Science, alongside experts from Yunnan University in China, has shown that complex animal life developed earlier than previously thought.
According to a University of Oxford press release, the new discoveries include fossils containing the distant relatives of starfish and sea cucumbers. Relatives of deuterostomes, a group of which humans are a part, were found in the Ediacaran period for the first time. Some fossils even contained species completely unknown to science. One of these new species, according to a statement by co-author Dr Frankie Dunn, “looks a lot like the sand worm in Dune”. Dr Luke Parry, another co-author on the study, said in a statement these discoveries reveal “a transitional community: the weird world of the Ediacaran giving way to the Cambrian”.
The work, published in the journal Science earlier this month, is based on new discoveries at a fossil assemblage known as the Jiangchuan Biota in Eastern Yunnan, China. It shows that some complex life forms whose development was previously traced to the Cambrian explosion – a period of rapid biodiversity growth 535 million years ago – were in fact present in the late Ediacaran period (554 – 539 million years ago).
Gaorong Li, the study’s lead author, told Cherwell that these finds help “bridge what once seemed to be a sharp gap between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian. It shows that…some of the anatomical and ecological foundations of the Cambrian Animal life were already in place beforehand.”
This team drew its conclusions from discoveries made by Li in his earlier work on the Jiangchuan Biota. In 2022, he “noticed some puzzling specimens” of algae which differed from those previously known about in the area. By 2023, he and his colleagues realised that the site “preserved not just algae but also genuine animal body fossils”. The preserved animal fossils were the focus of this latest research.
Li began his work on the Jiangchuan Biota in Yunnan before making the move to Oxford. Reflecting on the partnership between the two universities, Li told Cherwell: “The collaboration was crucial because it brought together complementary expertise.” Yunnan possessed the “field experience” from “years of work on the Jiangchuan Biota”, while Oxford had the “expertise in worldwide Ediacaran and early animal fossils”.
