The Ediacaran Period
- 演化之聲
- Mar 14
- 7 min read
As early as the late nineteenth century, scientists had already begun searching for evidence of life in the Precambrian, the vast span of time preceding the Cambrian Period. Fossils that would later be recognized as belonging to the Ediacaran biota were described during this early period of investigation, yet these discoveries attracted little attention at the time. Many paleontologists were reluctant to accept the possibility that large, macroscopic organisms existed before the Cambrian. For this reason, the beginning of the Phanerozoic Eon was traditionally marked by the Cambrian Period, when abundant visible fossils first appeared in the geological record.
Charles Darwin himself addressed this puzzle in On the Origin of Species. He wondered why such a remarkable burst of biodiversity seemed to occur abruptly in the Cambrian fossil record. Darwin suggested that the apparent absence of earlier fossils might not indicate a true absence of large organisms, but rather an incomplete geological record that had simply failed to preserve them.
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