Early life forms had a modular structure
By Sid Perkins
A cache of fossils recently unearthed in northeastern Newfoundland reveals that some of Earth’s earliest large organisms had modular body plans whose main architectural element was a branching, frondlike structure.
The organisms—scientists debate whether they were animals, plants, or neither—grew into flat, plumed, and floral shapes. The ancient creatures were entombed in fine-grained mud deposited on the seafloor about 565 million years ago, says Guy M. Narbonne, a paleontologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The sediments, some of which infiltrated the soft-bodied organisms, preserved internal and external body features as small as 30 micrometers across.