ROCKS in Newfoundland that are 575 million years old have revealed the earliest animal fossils yet discovered. The animals are 2 metres long – defying palaeontologists’ ideas about when the first anatomically complex multicellular animals evolved.
The newly discovered ancient creatures lived just 10 million years after what appears to be the last in a series of devastating ice ages, known as “Snowball Earth”, supposedly froze the planet and killed off almost all life. The discovery suggests either that early animals evolved amazingly fast after the ice melted, or that the ice did not cover the whole planet.
Only small, very…
