The first life on Earth: an exhibit at the South Australian Museum

At the South Australian Museum is the permanent exhibit The First Life: Ediacara Biota Gallery. It showcases examples of the oldest known complex, multicellular animal life on Earth.

The First Life Gallery is a relatively new gallery established to illustrate the evolution of life based on new field research. The museum’s palaeontologists are excavating areas of fossil sea floors, and discovering new fossil sites in the Flinders Ranges, in northern South Australia.

The First Life Gallery includes new examples of fossil specimens, animations, videos, and 3D fossil models to show how the animals may have moved and lived. The interesting specimens include the ancient seabeds displayed as a wall. Palaeontologists are still using this wall for further research.

The Ediacaran soft-bodied creatures – the first animal life on the planet – lived on microbial mats on the shallow sea floor. When covered by sand they were preserved as “death-mask imprints” – which are really the moulds and casts of their squashed bodies that have been preserved as mineral imprints in sandstone layers. These fossils were collected from many sites in the Flinders Ranges. They were the basis for defining the first new geological period in over a century, known as the Ediacaran Period. This new rung in the ecological ladder of life in geological time is marked with a “golden spike” in the Flinders Ranges National Park. It is the first “golden spike” marker to be defined in the rocks of the entire Southern Hemisphere.

The first life on Earth, the Ediacaran Period, began 635 million years ago, and ended 542 million years ago with the Cambrian Period of animal life, represented by animals with skeletons and shells.

In 2010, naturalist Sir David Attenborough visited the National Heritage Listed Ediacara at Nilpena in the Flinders Ranges with the South Australiam Museum’s palaeontologist Dr. Jim Gehling and the Ediacara volunteers as part of the First Life BBC television series.

http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au

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