Ediacara Biota

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2009

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests Martin Brasier, Richard Corfield and Rachel Wood discuss the Ediacara Biota, the Precambrian life forms which vanished 542 million years ago, and whose discovery proved Darwin right in a way he never imagined. Darwin was convinced that there must have been life before the Cambrian era, but he didn't think it was possible for fossils like the Ediacara to have been preserved. These sea-bed organisms were first unearthed in the 19th century, but were only recognised as Precambrian in the mid-20th century. This was an astonishing discovery. Ever since, scientists have been working to determine its significance. Were the Ediacara the earliest forms of animal life? Or were they a Darwinian dead end? Either way, it is argued, they reveal some of the secrets of the workings of evolution. Richard Corfield is Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University; Martin Brasier is Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Oxford; Rachel Wood is Lecturer in Carbonate Geoscience at the University of Edinburgh.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, in the 1940s, this was a prospector called Reginald Sprigg was working in southern Australia,
0:18.0	searching for uranium for Britain's atomic bomb project,
0:21.0	when he came across impressions in the rock unlike anything
0:23.8	he'd ever seen before, Sprig thought there might be fossils from before the Cambrian era.
0:29.6	This was an astonishing discovery. It was widely thought that bacteria aside, the dawn of life on
0:34.8	earth came with the Cambrian era about 542 million years ago. Charles Darwin thought
0:40.0	there must have been pre-Cambrian life forms but he never imagined anything like this.
0:44.4	These mysterious fossils became known as the Idiocara biota, but were they the beginnings of animal life,
0:51.4	or were they a failed experiment? And what hitherto unknown aspects
0:55.2	of evolution have they revealed? We'd me to discuss the Idi Karabota are Richard Corfield, visiting
1:00.8	senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, Martin Brazier, Professor of
1:05.3	Paleobiology at the University of Oxford, and Rachel Wood Lecture in Carbonade Geoscience
1:10.5	at the University of Edinburgh.
1:12.8	Richard Coffield, why did people think there was no life
1:16.2	other than bacteria until about 545 million years ago?
1:21.3	Now that goes back to the nature of the fossil record and the nature which was the way it was perceived
1:29.8	by 19th century geologists. It's conventional or it has been more or less since the
1:37.4	dawn of science of paleontology. For paleontology, paleontologists to
1:42.3	slice up time using fossils.
1:45.0	And the Phanorozoic, the dawn, the age of visible life, which is 542 million years old to the present day, is conventionally subdivided on the changing
	...

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