The First Big Animals Looked Like Aliens | Ediacaran Period

Before fish, before shells, before eyes, Earth's first large animals looked like nothing alive today. Meet the Ediacaran biota: the strange life that appeared after Snowball Earth. About 720–635 million years ago, ice spread across almost the entire planet. After the last great freeze thawed, the oceans changed, oxygen may have risen, and tens of millions of years later, around 575 million years ago, the first large, complex organisms appeared on the seafloor. They had no shells, no bones, and no eyes. In this video: 🔹 Snowball Earth: when the planet froze almost pole to pole 🔹 How the thaw may have set the stage for complex life 🔹 Dickinsonia, a flat animal over a meter long, and the 2018 cholesterol discovery that proved it was an animal 🔹 Charnia, Spriggina, Kimberella, Tribrachidium and other bizarre forms 🔹 The "Garden of Ediacara": a world without predators 🔹 Why they disappeared at the dawn of the Cambrian 📚 Sources Bobrovskiy et al. (2018), Science: Ancient steroids establish the Ediacaran fossil Dickinsonia as one of the earliest animals Which Ediacaran creature is the strangest to you? Tell me in the comments 👇 👉 Subscribe for more on Earth's history and the evolution of life. #Paleontology #SnowballEarth #Ediacaran