I’ve always wondered if there was a more ancient tree of life totally separate from our own...fractal plant-animals and trilateral creatures. This video just made my life. Thank you!

wow...trilateral symmetry!!! :D That's rad!

My wife and I toured the fossil beds of Mistaken Point on the southeastern tip of the Avalon Penninsula in June of 2017. It was 7,000 miles of driving (round trip) from Illinois. If you are interested, you can fly into St. John's Newfoundland and then drive to the point of departure for the guided tour. Its a 3-4 hour drive to the Mistaken Point Ranger Station. Then about an hour drive in with the ranger (using your vehicle), and then about another hour hike to the fossil bed. But goodness, the long trip seems to make the fossils all the more exciting. You wear soft booties as you walk amongst the hundreds of fossils, all easily seen. Of course a sunny warm day in June was the best, and we were lucky. Try to time the weather as best you can if you go.

Ah yes, the Chronicles of Charnia

I feel like an engaged kid watching these. Just goes to show the materials taught at school were BORING.

We need to bring back fractal animals and trilateral symmetry. Why haven't our top men taken care of this yet?

So they recognized that some fossils were 540 million years old,but they thought he was crazy for thinking his was 550 million years old? That makes perfect sense.

Gosh he is such a dad

How about an episode on the development of individual organs? When did the heart become a thing? Which organs evolved first?

All the dislikes are from people who went to their Bibles for the footnotes

2:59

Loving the content PBS Eons is putting out, it's mind-blowing every time.

I had heard about the Ediacaran Fauna and Precambrian multi-cellular life from my geology undergrad classes (almost, but not quite finished a minor), but I had never heard of the Avalon explosion. Then you mentioned it got named in 2008 and it all made sense. I finished my undergrad in '04. While it's totally expected, it's so awesome that science just keeps marching forward.

I knew about ediacaran lifeforms, but not a single word about this Avalon Explosion. Thanks!

Yes! I was hoping you did something on the Ediacaran biota. I find it fascinating because its like a snapshot of a possible alternate history of macroscopic/multicellular life. If these things survived, or there was no Cambrian explosion, life could look completely and utterly different than it does today. Makes me think of how strange complex alien lifeforms almost certainly must be.

"except my nose is crooked" GREAT now i can never unsee it :c

I'm Canadian and it's very interesting what they did when they were looking at the Avalon, actually. Because the fossils were found in shale banks on the edge of the Atlantic ocean and were slowly being eroded away, they actually covered whole patches of the Avalon Peninsula coast in thick sheets of rubber and then peeled them off to preserve the shapes of the fossils even after the originals eroded away. I think they're eventually planning on putting them on display here in Canada at some point, too.

This guy is certainly one of my most favorite show hosts I've heard, could listen to for hours. And this channel is helping me to learn the order of geological time periods, albeit slowly. xD

A new study finds out Dickinsonia is actually the very first metazooan known because scientists were able to identify a molecule (I think it was cholesterol) in a well preserved specimen. Cholesterol is only present on animals so this finding becomes Dickinsonia in the very first animal know until today. So apparently this fauna was very important to our evolution.

Excellent. I was waiting for you to do something on this. There were likely many explosions of life that we wont know about because it was all single celled.