Page 32 - The Dinosaur Book and Other Wonders of the Prehistoric World (DK-Smithsonian)

The f irst this fossil of a wormlike animal
Found in North Carolina,

has no evidence of a mouth,
eyes, or even a gut.
animals Pteridinium

Before the dinosaurs Charnia

Fossils show that
Charnia’s body was The flowerlike
made of rows of
branches, giving it a fossils of Mawsonites
may be the remains
striped appearance.
of free-swimming
jellyfish.
Attached to the seabed
by a stalk, Charnia had
a leaf-shaped body that
absorbed food from the water.

Mawsonites

Scientists once thought that the first similar microscopic single-celled organisms.
animals evolved about 542 million years But in 1957, a fossil was discovered in the
ago at the start of the Cambrian Period. Precambrian rocks of Charnwood Forest in
The huge span of Earth history before this, England. It was a multicelled life form, now
known as the Precambrian Period, was thought known as Charnia. Scientists then realized
30 to be almost lifeless apart from bacteria and that fossils of similar organisms found in the

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