Unknown 'world full of aliens' discovered in deep hole in Aussie outback
While the swimming pool-sized dig site in South Australia's outback may not look like much, its stratified layers of sandstone provide a glimpse into life that existed at the bottom of a shallow sea some 555-million-years ago.
"We're finding things that have been hidden for over half a billion years,' South Australian Museum palaeontologist Diego García-Bellido, who has been chipping away at the secret fossil bed with his team for the past few years, said.
The associated professor and his crew of 10 researchers and volunteers just returned from another 10-day stint at the excavation site in the Nilpena Ediacara National Park, 520km north of Adelaide.
'We found a new outcrop some kilometres away from the original Ediacara fossil beds, which were discovered in the early 2000s,' García-Bellido said.
After extracting each layer of rock by hand, researchers were thrilled to uncover a variety of fossilised organisms that once lived on the 20 metre-deep sea floor, including Dickinsonia, Tribrachidium, and Spriggina — all of which lived during the late Ediacaran period. At that time, Australia was still attached to Antartica, and the first animals were starting to evolve.
'The sea floor was covered with a microbial mat — not unlike what grows at the bottom of a swimming pool during winter — and there were a few organisms living and feeding on that mat,' García-Bellido said.
While some of the 'early complex organisms' did 'some of the things that animals do', they can't quite be classified as such, he added. 'These are the closest things to aliens that we have on our planet's history.'
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The impressions on the sandstone have been digitised and measured so further research can be conducted.
'We look at how they are distributed on the fossil surface and how they grow,' García-Bellido explained. 'How the juvenile is different to the adult, and what is the spatial relationships between each of the organisms.
'What this is telling us, is the world back then was much more complicated than we expected. We are finding things that have never been discovered before.'
The Ediacara fossils are now on display at the South Australian Museum for anyone who wants to see them first-hand.
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