CREATION - Snowball Earth - page 95

When Jim Gehling heard about these finds, he raced off to look at his own collections. Sure
enough, he found an Australian Dickinsonia doing just the same thing: three belly-prints and one final
fossil. And that meant one thing: these creatures could clearly move.
Perhaps, Jim thinks, the Dickinsonia and Yorgia were using their belly-flops as a way of feeding,
since neither had the benefit of teeth. They would lie on the slimy mat covering the seafloor and gradu-
ally consume the bacteria there. “If you lay on the lawn long enough, you'd rot the grass underneath
you,” says Jim. “And that's a source of food.” Obviously, then, the creatures would have to move
on when the food was exhausted. Misha agrees, and thinks that the Kimberella might also have been
moving to eat. Those scrape marks could have been places where it used a proboscis to rake in food
from the seafloor. And the travelling Kimberella left a long trail in its wake, just like a slug or a snail.
The ability to move sends an immediate message to biologists everywhere. These creatures had to
be complex. To make trails, you need tissues that behave like muscles; you have to be a cooperative
organism made of multiple specialized cells. Quilted air mattresses can't do it, nor can groups of bac-
teria. Kimberella didn't just look like a snail. It moved like a snail. The extraordinary traces from the
White Sea prove beyond doubt that Ediacarans really were complex, multicellular animals.
So now we know what Ediacarans were. But when were they? The fossils at Ediacara and in the
White Sea lived around 555 million years ago. That's an improvement on the Cambrian explosion, but
it's still some forty million years after the Snowball. The next step would be to find Ediacarans from
nearer the end of the ice.
M ISTAKEN P OINT is a windswept, godforsaken promontory on the southern tip of Newfoundland. It is
surrounded by the barrens: blasted, treeless heaths covered with mosses, lichens and tart crown ber-
ries. Nobody could love these barren lands, not even their mother. They are dreary and damp, their
plants the colour of overcooked spinach and rusty nails; when the wind is not buffeting them or rain
beating them down, they are shrouded in fog. The pale, thin caribou wander over them like lost souls.
The seas hereabouts were once rich with fish, but now that cod stocks have crashed and cod fishing
is banned, depression has descended on the area like one of its famous fogs. (This is, officially, the
foggiest place in the world.) Nobody has lived at Mistaken Point for decades, and only a few people
remain in the village of Trepassey, an hour's drive to the west. The locals there are friendly, their ac-
cents a fossilized form of Irish, their grammatical constructions archaic. “There you be. You likes that,
doesn't you?” they will say as they hand you a plate of salt beef. Or more probably cod, flown in from
somewhere, since old dietary habits die harder than most.
Trepassey means “the dead souls” in Basque, and was named by fishermen of the sixteenth century
for the many ships wrecked on this craggy coast. These waters hold the remains of thousands of people
who were betrayed over the centuries by fog and Arctic ice and high winds, especially at Mistaken
Point, which was “mistaken” by many unlucky sailors for the next finger of land along the coast. Seek-
ing the safe harbour at Cape Race, they would turn too soon, and founder. The lighthouse at Cape
Race received distress signals from the stricken Titanic , and is the closest place on land to the ship's
Atlantic grave.
The rocks of Mistaken Point are also grave sites, but for much more ancient creatures. To see these,
on one particularly grim day at the beginning of June, I have joined a troupe of soggy, sodden, steam-
ing geologists squelching over the saturated mosses and the black, muddy streams near the cliff top.
The rain is relentless. There is no perceptible distinction between sea and sky—both are the colour of