Were These The First Animals?

Describing these as "a failed experiment" when they lasted at least a hundred million years seems a little unfair. Similarly the dinosaurs (as land animals, not birds) lasted just as long as mammals have existed and an asteroid could easily make a successors species state that we were a failed experiment.

I love the ediacaran fauna... it's so underrated. it feels like those were animals that for the most part aren't ancestors of the creatures we see today. only a few of them went on to evolve into the groups we see today. it's really like a lost world

The tricky part of Ediacaran "animals" being ancestors to modern animals is not that we can't find Ediacarans that look like current animals. We can't even find Cambrian animals that look like Ediacarans.

"No more similar to a jelly fish, than an abandoned omelet." I'm dead. 🤣

The naturalist David Attenborough grew up in this area. He was an avid fossil collector he never looked in this area for fossils as the prevailing theory was that the rocks were pre-Cambrian and so held no fossils. Thanks for all your hard work and great content.

If only Tina and Roger had found those peculiar stones sooner. They could have shown them to that Attenborough boy who was always down the marsh collecting newts. Young David had only left the school the year before.

12:50 I hope Reginald eventually was recognized for his findings, and that his colleagues felt embarrassed after realizing they had missed something big. I can understand a journal like Nature being adverse to publishing something they must have considered a fringe theory at the time, but I’m sad he was so ignored about his findings by everyone.

When the majority of early animals are evolved to consume bacterial mats, it's not odd that they don't fundamentally look like the animals that existed later, after those mats no longer were common.

Being a biologist with a time machine would be one of the single greatest jobs in the history of ever.

This, along with the sister channel, history of the universe are by far the most informative, beautifully written, researched and structured documentaries. This is phenomenal work - I hope that "History of..." team gets the recognition that is so deserved.

Episode 28 and you're just now getting to the Cambrian. This is more detailed than any big-budget documentary I've ever seen. Truly staggering how much work you're putting in.

This is amazing. My master's thesis is on Ediacaran microbialites. It's so validating hearing such a high production channel talk about what I am researching.

I'm reminded of the Maxis game SimEarth, in which a clade of life from the Ediacaran (the Trichordates) were included in the evolutionary tree because they'd died out on Earth and the developers felt sorry for them

You don’t post a lot of videos but everything you release is a masterpiece.

This sort of material is why I STILL love YouTube. For all its faults it’s by far the best way to serendipitously learn fascinating material. Much like the joys of browsing an encyclopedia or a dictionary. You’re one of only a handful of channels I subscribe to, even after many years. Thank you so much for your efforts and achievements.

Thank you for not playing ridiculous overly dramatic music in these documentaries. The information is amazing enough, it doesn’t need to be made dramatic and tense, it can still be interesting.

Love the origins for this discovery, just schoolchildren exploring the woods and then writing to a professor... It's like something from a story book, Famous Five or something like that!

A class example of a youtube channel that blows multi million dollar discovery channel productions out the water. The writing,, editing, production and execution of all the videos on this channel is always top, top quality. I am always just as fascinated by this as I am by the subject matter. Thanks to the creators for your awesome work.

Another potential classification of these 'proto-animals' might be the superorganisms we can see today in the form of Portuguese Man o' Wars and other siphonophores. They're 'creatures' made up of multiple micro-organisms that each fulfil a different role in the community, from capturing food to transporting nutrients around the body. Perhaps the parts that had the means of collecting food for the Ediacaran critters weren't preserved, or even permanently attached. Similarly, somewhat, they could be some of many other lifeforms that straddle the line between single-celled and multicellular, like bacterial colonies and slime molds. There's even types of amoeba that live most of their lives as independent individuals, reproducing asexually; except for when they all decide to form a clump that then grows itself upward into a tube shape that hardens out, like a plant or fungus; or when they encounter another individual with a similar but slightly different genetic makeup, at which point they start to rapidly sexually (kind of) reproduce while devouring all of their former(?) family members. Heck, you could even argue that every macro-organism is a superorganism, since there isn't a single one around that doesn't rely on a ridiculously complex mini ecosystem of micro-organisms (and even some larger ones) to survive and metabolise their food for them. Even the mitochondrion (you know, the powerhouse of the cell) is technically speaking an ancient hitch-hiker, with its own DNA and everything, and we literally couldn't do a thing without them.

i feel SO BAD for the girl at the beginning.... she found it first but her teacher wouldn't listen. Then again, you'd be hard pressed to find a teacher that DOES listen, ever, in my experience lmao