CREATION - Snowball Earth - page 94

young, he loved hunting and fishing, but now his heart lies elsewhere. He hasn't touched a gun since
he found his first Ediacaran fossil, nearly thirty years ago. “Fossil hunting,” he says, “captures your
soul.”
Misha's fossils come from the sea cliffs of Russia's White Sea coast, near the remote northern port
of Arkhangel'sk. The train journey from Moscow takes twenty-two hours, crammed in a cabin with
everything for the season: army-surplus tents, ropes and climbing gear, food tins, slabs of butter and
cheese. From the port there's another ten-hour journey by boat to the campsite, squeezed on a beach
between steep, sloping cliffs of clay and the bleak White Sea.
Occasionally a river has cut a canyon through the cliffs on its way to the sea, and Misha usually
tries to camp near one of these for the fresh water it provides. Though the White Sea is a branch of
the Arctic Ocean, there is no ice on it in the summer. But the weather can still be grim. When it rains,
the soft clay of the cliffs turns to pale, glutinous mud that yanks at your boots, and coats everything
it touches. Sometimes there is a storm out to sea, and the water rises up on to the beach in a foaming
mass, and rips through the camp.
Good weather, on the other hand, brings that other famous Arctic hazard: the flies. At first sight
the taiga (Arctic forest) along the rivers looks impenetrable. Then you realize that the stunted trees are
in fact widely spaced, and that the gaps between them are dark with dancing clouds of mosquitoes and
black flies. On any fine beach day, these blood-hungry beasts will come for you. Like Paul Hoffman
in Canada, Misha and his co-workers have gradually become inured to this menace. But one American
researcher who joined Misha in the White Sea a few years ago was so badly bitten that his face quickly
swelled to twice its normal size. Still, he wasn't particularly troubled. That same year he discovered
a new species of Ediacaran that is now named after him. What are a few insect bites, when you can
achieve immortality with the neatest of twists—passing your name on not to a descendant, but to an
ancestor? 7
The White Sea cliffs are packed with Ediacaran fossils. Like their Australian cousins, the creatures
preserved here lived in a warm, shallow sea, and were suffocated with periodic blankets of sand. Now
the crumbly clay of the cliffs is interleaved with layers of sandstone bearing the familiar Ediacaran
death masks. Each spring new landslides send sandstone slabs tumbling down on to the beach. Each
summer Misha returns to see what spectacular new finds have been loosened by the rains.
And some of Misha's more recent discoveries baffled him. He found four Dickinsonia , all exactly
the same size, grouped together on a single slab. Puzzlingly, three were raised up proud from the sand-
stone in positive relief, and only the fourth was the usual indented mould. He also found a slab bear-
ing Yorgia , another oval creature, which had internal riblike structures and strange squashed shapes
that could have been some kind of organs; there, once again, Misha saw four fossils together, three
of them in positive relief, one negative. And there was Kimberella , a creature the shape of a teardrop,
with a flouncy frill around its edges that looked to Misha like the undulating foot of a slug or snail. At
the pointed end of one fossil, Misha found grooves in the rock, as if something had been raking the
seafloor just before the sandstorm hit. At the ends of others he noticed long, dark traces, many times
longer than the Kimberella itself. 8
Trails. These were all trails. Misha realized that the four Dickinsonia fossils had all come from one
individual. Three times this creature had rested on the slimy microbial mat that coated the seafloor,
and left an imprint of its belly there. The first three death masks stood up from the sandstone slab be-
cause the sand had reached out to fill hollows in the seafloor. Only the fourth was indented—a true
mould of an Ediacaran's body. And the same thing applied to the Yorgia . Misha's sandstone slabs had
captured the three previous belly-prints of the organism as well as its own corpse.