CREATION - Snowball Earth - page 92

palaeontologists were stolen in the night by people using crowbars and mechanical diggers. There's
nothing left to see.
But if you swear not to reveal its whereabouts, Jim can take you to a secret location where the
fossils are still intact, and in place. You go in the early morning or late afternoon to catch the slanting
rays of what Jim calls “fossil light”. First you take a paved road north into the Flinders, then a bush
track that's strewn perilously with rocks. (Don't offer to drive; Jim doesn't like being driven. But he's
gracious about it, and he's also such a good driver in the bush that you probably won't mind.) The
landscape is muted, as if faded by the sun to shades of pale terracotta and drab olive grey. On the left,
a line of straggly gum trees marks the bed of a dried creek. The ground around is stony, a desert pave-
ment scattered with squat, round saltbushes. Apart from the wedgetailed eagle sheltering in one of the
gums, and the ubiquitous, irritating Aussie flies around your face, there is no life to be seen.
The track swings around a corner and stops at the foot of a gentle hillside, covered with slabs of
pale stone. They are irregularly shaped, an inch or two thick and several feet across like broken, proph-
etic tablets. Jim climbs to one of them, turns it over, and begins to scrub off the dirt with a yellow
brush that he has pulled out of his pack. (“Here's the main instrument for this sort of work. A nylon
dishwashing brush. Two dollars.”) And then he holds the slab out for inspection.
The reason for going early in the morning is now clear. At first you see only the stippled red under-
side of the rock. But then the slanting light casts shadows that resolve into an oval indented image like
a giant thumbprint, perhaps six inches long. The creature that left this imprint is called Dickinsonia ,
one of the icons of the Ediacaran world. Its body is segmented like a worm's, and split by a groove
running down its centre. Perhaps this was a stiffening rod for its soft body. Perhaps it is the trace of a
gut. At one end, the strange parabolic segments are slightly thicker and wider than at the other. Unlike
the inhabitants of Slimeworld, this creature knew the difference between head and tail.
Now Jim is turning over more slabs, and finding more fossils. There's a squashed, sponge-like
creature called Palaeophragnodictya , revealed as a small disc set slightly off-centre within a larger
one. There's another disc with a set of grooves inside it, like the outline of a cartoon arrowhead.
“Aspidella,” Jim says, and then moves on. Some Ediacaran fossils have flouncy, frilled edges like a
Victorian petticoat. Others have discs and stems and branches. One looks like a Roman coin, another
like a sheriff's badge—a tiny, five-pointed star inside a ridged circle. Some are truly enormous. One
Dickinsonia found at this site, Jim says, was more than three feet long.
There's something extraordinary about seeing these ancient ancestors lying in front of you, every-
where you look. Perhaps one of these slabs bears a single indented shape that will shock the biological
world. There might be a new species, one that you could name after yourself. The spirit of the hunt
catches you, and you start to lift slab after slab. You find more ghostly Dickinsonia shapes; then a
Spriggina , with a long, ridged body and blunt head. But then, suddenly, the sun is too high in the sky,
and the images vanish.
The Ediacarans imprinted on these rocks lived—and died—in a shallow, sandy seafloor close to
shore. They were the first large creatures to appear on Earth after the long epoch of microscopic slime.
Theirs was an innocent age. Predators had not yet been invented, and big, defenceless sheets of flesh
like Dickinsonia could lie around on the seafloor with impunity. “If you want to have a Garden of
Eden from some time in the history of life, this was it,” Jim says.
But death still came to these particular unfortunates, in the shape of a storm that stirred up the
peaceful sea and brought sand cascading down to smother them where they lay. Each thin slab of rock
on the hillside was created during one such underwater sandstorm. Even then, the Ediacarans' soft
bodies would have rotted away to nothing, if Slimeworld hadn't intervened to preserve them. Most