Scientists Discover the Identity of 558-Million-Year-Old Ancient Creature, Solving a Decades-Old Mystery

finally removed all the speculations and conclusively classified the creature as an animal.

Experts found it difficult to come to the same page regarding the identity of this creature because of how distinct it appeared to be from modern beings. In this study, researchers took into consideration the growth pattern of these organisms to classify them into a group. “Discriminating between these different hypotheses has been difficult, as there are so few morphological features in Dickinsonia to compare to modern organisms. In this study we took the approach of looking at populations of this organism, including assumed juvenile and adult individuals, to assess how it grew and to try to work out how to classify it from a developmental perspective,” Co-author Dr Alex Liu, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge explained.

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noted that researchers combined growth data with information about past Dickinsonia fossils to establish its true nature. ‘We were able to confirm that Dickinsonia grows by both adding and inflating discrete units to its body along its central axis. But we also recognized that there is a switch in the rate of unit addition versus inflation at a certain point in its life cycle. All previous studies have assumed that it grew from the end where each “unit” is the smallest, and was therefore considered to be the youngest. We tested this assumption and interpreted our data with growth assumed from both ends, eventually coming to the conclusion that people have been interpreting Dickinsonia as having grown at the wrong end for the past 70 years,” lead author Dr Renee Hoekzema, a PhD candidate in Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute added.

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was an early animal, belonging to either the Placozoa or the Eumetazoa group. In the past experts had associated Dickisonia with the Ediacaran biota- an ancient biota of soft-bodied organisms that lived around 580 million years ago. Despite there being almost 200 species in this group, it has been difficult to characterize them because of their dissimilarity with extinct and living organisms.

The study has been a breakthrough in the analysis of Ediacaran biota as it is the first time a creature from this group has been identified as an animal. “This finding demonstrates that animals were present among the Ediacaran biota and importantly confirms a number of recent findings that suggest animals had evolved several million years before the Cambrian Explosion that has been the focus of attention for studies into animal evolution for so long,” Liu added. The discovery allows the experts to involve these creature in the study of animal kingdom evolution.