’Mysterious’ ancient creature was definitely an animal, research confirms

It lived well over 550 million years ago, is known only through fossils and has variously been described as looking a bit like a jellyfish, a worm, a fungus and lichen. But was the 'mysterious' Dickinsonia an animal, or was it something else? A new study by researchers at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, and the British Geological Survey provides strong proof that Dickinsonia was an animal, confirming recent findings suggesting that animals evolved millions of years before the so-called Cambrian Explosion of animal life. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B . Lead author on the paper is Dr Renee Hoekzema, a PhD candidate in Oxford University's Mathematical Institute who carried out this research while completing a previous PhD in Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences. She said: ' Dickinsonia belongs to the Ediacaran biota - a collection of mostly soft-bodied organisms that lived in the global oceans between roughly 580 and 540 million years ago. They are mysterious because despite there being around 200 different species, very few of them resemble any living or extinct organism, and therefore what they were, and how they relate to modern organisms, has been a long-standing palaeontological mystery.' In 1947, Dickinsonia became one of the first described Ediacaran fossils and was initially thought to be an organism similar to a jellyfish. Since then, its strange body plan has been compared to that of a worm, a placozoan, a bilaterian and several non-animals including fungi, lichens and even entirely extinct groups.