Ediacaran

Yeah, it's really interesting.

sort of looking at evolution like that because I was actually interviewing Chris Packham yesterday about there's a new BBC series called Evolution coming out and it tells the sort of stories of all these different animals and their unique traits and And then it takes you back to like the Ediacaran to explain why it was something that happened then, then led to something else.

And that it's all this kind of like series of advantageous little blips that then give rise to these like crazy different lifestyles.

And you mentioned earlier that you were obviously out getting this tracker back before it got lost to the ocean.

It had been alive and active almost from life's earliest chapters.

The Ediacaran biota looked unlike most animals alive today.

Before the familiar world of shells, claws, and swimming predators, the sea floor held organisms so strange that scientists still debate how to understand them.

Many had soft bodies with quilted patterns, frond-like forms, or rounded shapes that seemed difficult to place on the modern tree of life.

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Some Ediacaran creatures grew like quilted mats on the seafloor.

Many organisms from this period had bodies divided into repeated sections that resemble padded stitching.

So from the beginning, it was just like finding treasures, you know, and we find them in these quarries.

I know there are some really famous fossil sites in Australia, particularly for the animals that preceded the Great Cambrian Explosion, the Ediacaran.

Did you know that? No.

The really earliest life forms are the famous spot in Australia.

[laughs]

Shortly after that, there is also a pair of glaciation events during the Ediacaran period between about 580 to 540 million years ago.

There's evidence for fluctuating glacial deposits, possibly lining up with turnovers and extinctions in the Ediacaran fauna of the time.

Yeah.

All of that is before the Phanerozoic.

At departure, complex multicellular life on Earth was in its earliest stages.

The Ediacaran biota, those strange soft-bodied organisms preserved in ancient seafloor sediments, had not yet appeared.

The traveller arrives at a cosmic superstructure to find that the entire Phanerozoic Aeon, every chapter of visible animal life from trilobites to elephants, transpired during the commute.

And these are merely the structures close enough to have names and detailed measurements.

Here, the air hung heavier outdated pressure gauges ticked idly along the wall A low persistent hum throbbed from somewhere beneath the floor The researcher's quarters first on the right looked lived in and disturbed Drawers half open And mug ringed in stale coffee That tested positive By Pavlos finger For caffeine Only days Old Weeks after the base's Official abandonment I checked the fridge Found vials labeled CBR effects In block letters A custom antidote Perhaps for some exposure Each one Was empty But for sticky residue Mia's field notes left on the bunk smelled faintly of pharmaceuticals Did she say anything? I asked Saito He hesitated She talked about shadows moving in the walls with the wind Last night she was up late drawing patterns in the salt on her glove I told her to get sleep "I should have." His words tailed off On a shelf Pavlov unearthed a battered logbook Its last entries In a wild erratic hand Notes from Dr.

Elena Kranz Trying to restore the Ediacaran heir One page read Vectors might imprint Hair doesn't believe me Gone too far Something wants To breathe The words ran into each other Lyrics in a song Of panic As I closed the binder Pavlo stopped me 'Found an old walkie talkie,' he called Holding up a battered receiver crusted with grease He clicked it on Static raging Test test All we heard was incoherent whispering looping backward It pulsed most loudly when we walked toward the blocked end of the corridor A heavy steel hatch welded At three points Crusted in white mineral Above it in smeared marker Do not enter Cycle pending The light inside was colder now as if the circuits themselves Had chilled In anticipation That evening I took time to review the audio files Left in the researchers cache There were a half dozen Most cryptic Ranging From mundane to panicked All ended either in static Or a looped fragment as though someone Cut the recording mid word Each time the station's alarm Code Four notes Was audible in the background The same pattern we'd heard the nightmare vanished As I listened Saito crashed in pale and shivering “There's something in the air system.” The CO2 alarms are pulsing even with the processors on full I keep smelling plants It's not possible But it's there Pavlo appeared in the doorway holding two siphon canisters Let's pop that weld He said voice grim If Mir's trapped or if someone else is Will find out I nodded Feeling the dread knot tighter under my ribs We suited up No one wanted to risk Exposure to whatever Might be Inside Pavlo handled the cutting torch Made quick work of the cold Brittle welds As the final seam gave A blast of stale Mineral sweet Air whooshed Out Stinging my nostrils Before the filters caught it I coughed behind My mask And shined my headlamp in The chamber beyond was bigger Than I'd expected An unregistered laboratory Cluttered With old scientific apparatus Pressure chambers Tubing twisting like diseased arteries Sealed glass terraria Filled with soil samples rimed in a hard dry Salt A cracked environmental display on the wall Flashed numbers Co two O two CH four At levels you'd expect Four hundred million years ago Not today Someone had jury rigged the System to run on a Closed loop Trapping ancient air within We stepped inside The temperature Dropped On the benches Preserved plant Samples curled Up in impossible forms White filamentous moss Tangled with Wires Their roots anchored in blocks of gray Ancient clay The smell Sweet Heavy Somewhere between formaldehyde and old hay Hung Like a curse Then against the Back Wall Something black and glossy crusted the paneling A fungal growth Frozen in spreading whirls Reaching out from a Cracked vent It shimmered with its own rhyme As if the cold Could only stall Not kill Whatever it was It sprawled across a series of monitoring screens One of which flickered with a frozen Log In Doctor Krantz's name Pavlo Shivering Scanned the gauges Refitted for a Carboniferous test Look Air mix at one percent Otwo This isn't any legal experiment I ignored his panic long enough to clamber to the central terminal, nursing a failing battery.

On the display, a partially decrypted message from Kranz scrolled by half code, half accusation: Outliers in psychogenic markers...

Caution spillover events Team not to enter until vectors cleared Ignore Hare protocol holds We are not alone It seemed the experiment was to revive microbial life bacteria spores from these pre-human atmospheres but the logs grew more feverish squeezing the term mental penetration between nonsense equations and threats The walkie's static whistled to life again as we crossed the room loud enough to rattle my teeth Shut that off I snapped at Pavlo Sato so far had been silent staring at the black mold like a man shown his own death My sleeplessness pressed in As Pavlo prodded the fungus with a gloved probe I found myself seeing shifts in light that weren't there Long afterimages looming in the cold edges of movement flickering whenever I looked away I heard perhaps only in my head A wordless sigh that came not from breath or broken vent But from inside my helmet Pavlo was the first to verbalize the dread Did anyone else just see something move? He was shaking His voice rough with exhaustion I tried to steady him But my own nerves were unspooling fast We retreated to the outer corridor Barricaded the hatch And took turns resting Sato prescribed us all sedatives And I sat awake Holding the decrypted log And trying to make sense of the patterns That kept swimming behind my eyes Outside the bunk The wind clawed at the panels Like something hungry By now paranoia was mounting We hadn't slept Hadn't eaten except cold rations Sato and Pavlo argued over everything Where to search Whether to trust the logs Or our own senses Sato tried to hold things together Peppering us with questions Then falling silent as Pavlo accused him Half joking Of knowing more than he said After twenty minutes of silence Pavlo began pulling apart the wall panel nearest the southern lab's entrance Inside he uncovered more than wires An old heavily corroded walkie talkie Its battery nearly dead When powered on it wailed With a sound that made my teeth vibrate A kind of recorded voice Reversed Almost angry Loudest Just beside the sealed hatch It was then I realized The walkie wasn't transmitting It was receiving Something From inside the substation Or maybe below it I decided to focus on what I could control Sifting through the research logs I managed to crack a critical segment Krantz' final days played out in fragments Day fifteen Atmosphere controls sabotaged The others think I'm lying Hare wants to vent Says I'm exposing us But it's not spillover Not contamination Something crossed over alive They can't see it But it's in the cycles They'll lock us in Or maybe out But the cycle isn't complete Day eighteen Logs encrypted Do not trust Hare Comms cut from inside They want to go I can't breathe the new air The old air wants to stay It wants to fragment ends Each page was worse than the last Wild with threats Accusations Hints of sabotage The scientists' Paranoia had become violent At points Kranz and Hare directly threatened one another accusing each other of letting it in whoever or whatever 'it' was The psychosis if that's what it was Grew with exposure To the sealed labs Ancient air Or else Their own venomous relationships had become the vector As I set the log aside Pavlo's hands started to shake uncontrollably Sweat froze almost instantly at his hairline Even though the room Wasn't that cold You're going to lock me in He said to Sato Then to me With the old air With whatever's in the vault Don't touch me His voice grew shrill He lunged wild at Sato Who tried to calm him But Pavlo Was beyond listening I wrestled him to the ground My heart hammering In that moment Through a far shaft in the lab's flooring A maintenance duct left unsealed I caught a glimpse of an impossible sight A faint pulsing green glow Alive and unnatural Throbbing through the filigree of ancient tubing It was coming from deep Below the floor Brightening each time The atmospheric alarm Blares from the walls Sato shone his flashlight down the shaft But the green faded Leaving behind Only a vague Phosphorescent afterimage On the rusted pipes That night as Sato tended to Pavlo Whose grip on reality Flickered with every shadow I spent an hour weighing Our options Our way out through the upper modules Was failing The tunnels near collapse The comms Cut from both sides The only way forward I saw now Was not escape But deeper descent The truth was sealed Under this station Whatever anomaly Kranz' logs And the vaults Air concealed It was older and stranger Than contamination or madness I would have to go beneath even if nothing waited but the echo of our own mistakes The rest of the world outside the reinforced doors was just wind and white Inside the history we'd inherited whatever it now wanted to become was all that we had left The rest of the world outside the reinforced doors was just wind and white Inside the history we'd inherited whatever it now wanted to become was all that we had left I put on a spare jacket and huddled in the admin block's galley pouring over the battered site schematics tracing the lines that marked crawl spaces ductwork and pressure drops Sato brewed weak coffee in silence, occasionally glancing at Pavlo, who sat slumped, wrists wrapped in gauze where he'd clawed at his own gloves during the episode.

and mammals were able to rapidly fill all the empty niches, creating apes and elephants and horses and even whales.

So after Snowball Earth, the Ediacaran era gives us the first extensive fossil evidence for multicellular organisms.

There were various ancient forms that resemble today's worms, corals, mollusks, various underwater plants.

But then in the Cambrian era, adaptive radiation really got underway and multicellular life filled thousands upon thousands of niches, unlocked by their new traits.

The main thrust right now, we're working on the first radiation of animal life over the globe.

It happened in a period called the Ediacaran, which just predated the Cambrian period, which is when the explosion of essentially all the major phyla that we know today in the animal kingdom appeared in the Cambrian.

A whole ecosystem of animal life evolved- None of which is easily relatable to modern phyla or the Cambrian fauna.

But nonetheless, the Earth was crawling with animals.

Every continent has examples of these animals.

We know they're animals 'cause they made burrow tracks, and we can tell from their body plans they're bilaterians and so forth, and almost were certainly oxygen-consuming animals.

And about 575 million years ago is when this radiation, Ediacaran radiation, occurred.

And so the question is, what drove that? What we think is that there may have been a big influence by a major meteorite impact.

And they enormously enrich our understanding of the, uh, diversification of life at that time.

They're preceded, uh, after a period of probably major ice ages by the so-called Ediacaran faunas.

It now seems pretty clear that they, although they look very puzzling, are also animals.

And this is still ongoing work, but the trick is to understand what relationship exists between the Cambrian faunas, which we now know reasonably well, and the Ediacaran faunas, which paradoxically effectively lack skeletons but are abundantly preserved in many, many parts of the world.

So the whole process is relatively protracted.

In terms of Earth history, it's relatively short.

Uh, I, I think evolutionary biology's in quite a rich period right now.

We've, we've just got a new Museum of Zoology at the University of Reading o- on, on the ground floor of our Health and Life Sciences building.

550 million years ago, something worked out how to stop eating.

There's a fossil tube dweller called Conotubus from the Ediacaran, before shells, before jaws, before most of what we'd recognise as animal behaviour.

And the new chemistry says it apparently didn't feed itself.

It housed colonies of sulphur-eating bacteria inside its body and let them do the work.