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Canadian Researcher's Findings Help Identify New Geological Period
 It’s been over 120 years since a new geological period was named. Along with the Cambrian, Cretaceous, Jurassic, and eight other periods named in the 19th century, geologists around the world can now add the Ediacaran Period to the geological scale.
This new geological period is based on the findings of a group of international researchers, which includes Queen’s University palaeontologist Dr. Guy Narbonne.
“It’s quite a momentous event,” says the NSERC-funded researcher. “Naming a geological period has the same impact as finding a new planet.”
The Ediacaran period, which runs from 620 to 542 million years ago, was approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences and announced in the July 30 issue of Science.
The Ediacaran Period is characterized by soft-bodied organisms, called Ediacara biota, that lived after the Proterozoic global ice ages 720 to 580 million years ago and before the Cambrian “explosion” of animal life. In 2003, Dr. Narbonne discovered and named the oldest known fossils of complex multi-cellular life – impressions of soft-bodied fronds on the coast of Newfoundland. They’re 575 million years old.
These fossils represent a failed experiment that dominated the first 15 million years of animal evolution and represented 85% of species. Dr. Narbonne’s newest discovery, reported in a cover story in a recent (August 20) issue of Science, shows that they were constructed of 2 cm-long, fractally-branching elements that were used as the “building blocks of life” and were combined in many ways to create larger life forms that filled the Ediacaran seas.
The newly-discovered fossils in Newfoundland are unique because they are so well preserved. Ediacaran fossils are usually preserved as flattened impressions in sandstone beds, but these were preserved in deep sea mud, leaving three dimensional fossils. “My first words when I saw them were ‘Can this be real?’” explains Dr. Narbonne. “They are truly spectacular.”
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