Skip to content
RichseenAtlas← AtlasSign in

Ediacara Hills, Flinders Ranges

node · earth

Low hills in the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia where, in 1946, the government geologist Reg Sprigg noticed impressions of soft-bodied organisms on the undersides of sandstone slabs at an abandoned lead mine. He published them in 1947 as early Cambrian jellyfish; they are in fact older than the Cambrian, and they gave their name to the Ediacaran Period and to a whole global biota. The Ediacaran organisms are frondose, quilted, disc-like and bilaterally arranged forms preserved as casts and moulds rather than as bodies, many of them centimetres to tens of centimetres across, and a large proportion cannot be confidently assigned to any living group. Some almost certainly are animals — biomarker work on Dickinsonia recovered cholesteroids, which are characteristic of animals — while others may represent lineages that left no descendants. The type area is one of the very few places where an entire ecosystem is preserved in situ on bedding planes; Nilpena, on the adjacent plain, has had dozens of fossil bedding surfaces excavated and laid out in place, and was given national park status by South Australia in the 2020s.

Read in · 1

Evidence · 1
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 2
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 32 blocks · 1 evidence · 24 related

  1. Story
  2. Low hills in the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia where, in 1946, the government geologist Reg Sprigg noticed impressions of soft-bodied organisms on the undersides of sandstone slabs at an abandoned lead mine. He published them in 1947 as early Cambrian jellyfish; they are in fact older than the Cambrian, and they gave their name to the Ediacaran Period and to a whole global biota. The Ediacaran organisms are frondose, quilted, disc-like and bilaterally arranged forms preserved as casts and moulds rather than as bodies, many of them centimetres to tens of centimetres across, and a large proportion cannot be confidently assigned to any living group. Some almost certainly are animals — biomarker work on Dickinsonia recovered cholesteroids, which are characteristic of animals — while others may represent lineages that left no descendants. The type area is one of the very few places where an entire ecosystem is preserved in situ on bedding planes; Nilpena, on the adjacent plain, has had dozens of fossil bedding surfaces excavated and laid out in place, and was given national park status by South Australia in the 2020s.
  3. Knowledge
  4. The evolution of multicellularity
  5. Ediacara Hills, Flinders Ranges
  6. The Cambrian explosion
  7. Connections
  8. The evolution of multicellularity
  9. The Cambrian explosion
  10. Sprigg notices impressions at the Ediacara mine
  11. Endosymbiosis and the eukaryotic cell
  12. Bangiomorpha pubescens
  13. Francevillian Basin, Gabon
  14. Ediacara Hills, Flinders Ranges
  15. Centimetre-scale structures reported from 2.1 Ga Gabonese shales
  16. Molecular clock dating
  17. Ediacara Hills, Flinders Ranges
  18. Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
  19. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
  20. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
  21. Anomalocaris
  22. Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
  23. The Great Oxidation Event
  24. The end-Ordovician mass extinction
  25. Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
  26. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
  27. Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
  28. Anomalocaris
  29. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
  30. Molecular clock dating
  31. Evidence
  32. Supports the 1946 discovery of the Ediacara impressions and their original — and incorrect — assignment to the early Cambrian. Deliberately cited without page numbers, which were not confirmed. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked.
Close the narrative
Observed changes · 0

No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.

Actions

Read the assembled narrativeContinue in StudioOpen TwinTwin does not start a decision from this kind of object.ShareSaveSaved objects are part of the authenticated projection, which is declared and not yet built.

/atlas?object=SITE_EDIACARA_HILLS&experience=SITE_EDIACARA_HILLS