Prehistoric organisms may have been terrestrial

Science News : New findings regarding an early life form, Ediacaran fauna , which lived some 575 milllion to 542 million years ago, indicate that the creatures might have been land dwelling rather than ocean dwelling as had been previously thought. Based on recent analyses of rocks from Australia’s Ediacara Hills, Gregory Retallack of the University of Oregon in Eugene has determined that they were actually formed from fossilized soils and not from sea bottom as has long been believed. The study , which appears online in Nature, is controversial because not only would it redefine where Earth’s earliest complex multicellular organisms lived, but it also could mean that “decades of studies of ancient environments were based on flawed assumptions,” writes Susan Milius for Science News.