No ones talking about the Francevillian.

No one’s talking about the Francevillian. It has fossils of the FIRST EVER MULTICELLULAR LIFE and existed a WHOPPING TWO BILLION YEARS AGO. The Ediacaran was only a quarter as ancient! It happened just before the end of the Great Oxygenation Event. The extra oxygen gave life the ability to go multicellular and form complex structures.
There were creatures that look like fried eggs, similar to Petri dish colonies.

There’s also similar animals that looked like a fried egg on a string of beads, like some sort of weird flower on a stem.

There’s even strange circular collections of spheroidal animals, possibly colonial organisms?

A new discovery this year shows lenticular, disc shaped fossils that look like UFOs. They were planktonic and were less than 5 centimeters in size. They had a chambered interior that could have played a role in their movement through the water column. They also had a lot of zinc. Huh. Neat.

Unfortunately, they all died out when the GOE ended and there was a drop in oxygen. Rip. 🙁

Plus there’s also more super old fossils such as:
Gypania spiralis, a weird, spring-shaped fossil that could’ve been some sort of algae. It existed 2.1 billion years ago.
Diskagma buttonii, a super old fungus that was really tiny and terrestrial. It looked like a cup, and had filamentous structures within the hole of the cup shaped body. It existed 2.2 billion years ago.

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I love these fellas, even as fossils they're friend shaped, wished more people knew about them

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It’s a personal theory of mine that we are very behind in the whole “space exploration” part due to this very event. If in other planets no such thing happened as the great oxidation event as did to us there might alien civilizations literally millions years more advanced than us due to this.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      What if the opposite is true and the GOE is the only reason why life was able to form on Earth and we're all alone in the universe?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Not that anon but I think life is not that uncommon but life capable of forming civilization is extremely rare. Animals with a body plan similar to primates evolved in the past but no intelligent animal capable of forming civilization evolved from them. Anatomically modern humans exist for at least 300 thousands of years ago but our oldest civilizations appeared around only 3 thousands of years ago and we almost went extinct before that. Human global population dropped to a few thousands 70 thousands of years ago, if that went a tiny bit worse humans would have vanished before the first civilization and Earth would continue being a planet inhabited by animals doing no more than primitive tools like crows, chimps, etc. in fact if aliens took a bunch of pre-historic humans and dropped them in a zoo planet similar to Earth populated by Earth animals before our near extinction chances are that these humans still are in tribal stage and never formed a civilization. Many human populations still live in tribes today, some kind of chain of events must have happened in our past that stimulated the formation of civilizations and these events happening together is so rare that it never happened in hundreds of thousands of years. I think many animals currently on Earth could evolve into sapient species capable of forming civilizations but the chances of that happening are extremely low.

  3. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I want to be an alien and travel to worlds where life is developing so I can dip my nuts in the mud and confuse some poor paleontologist a few billion years later.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      dude same

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      holy shit that would be hilarious, imagine you're a paleontologist and you see two circles next to each other in the fossil record and you reconstruct it as some sort of weird crustacean or something similar to the Francevillian creatures but in reality it's just the imprint of a prankster alien's ballsack

  4. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >lived before predation
    NOBODY FRICKING CARES

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      I care.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      I care.

      I care too!

  5. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    How do they know it lived that long ago?
    Were they actually there and took a pic?
    Didn't think so, get a life loser

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      You know there's something called isotopes and rock strata, right?
      People know how old a rock is by how much of a specific isotope(an element on the Periodic Table but with different levels of neutrons) and where the rock strata is compared to other rock strata.

  6. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I've always found the Francevillian amazing and it's made me wonder just how little of the fossil record that we have of the precambrian. Very nice thread though, OP.

  7. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    but did they have feathers?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      no 🙁

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        how would you know, conservitard?

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Feathers evolved in the Triassic in dinosaurs and avian ancestors.
          The Francevillian biota are...aquatic creatures, or could be something else entirely.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        It is very fascinating that multicellular life evolved before animals came about. Imagine how much different life could have been if the GOE hadn't resulted in a crash of oxygen levels. Animals may not have even evolved, at least no in the way we envision them. Multicellular life over the course of 2 billion years would be fricking wild and the world would be radically different.
        But I do wish we had a better understanding of multicellular experiments before the Ediacaran. It's fascinating beyond belief. Entire kingdoms of life that existed for but a brief moment in geological terms.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          ??

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >no 🙁
        We'll just have to see about that, chud!

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