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| Dickinsonia, Kimberella, and Funisia |
It was soft. It was strange. In some cases, it looked rather like a quilted bathmat.
And according to a remarkable collection of fossils announced in 2026, it was already moving, feeding and finding increasingly creative ways to make more of itself some 567 million years ago.
Welcome to the Ediacaran, an interval of Earth history spanning approximately 635 to 539 million years ago. It was a world before dinosaurs, before forests, before fish and even before the evolutionary enthusiasm of the Cambrian Explosion.
There were no ammonites spiralling through the seas, no crabs shuffling sideways and no vertebrates of any kind looking down their noses at the spineless masses.
Indeed, there were no noses.
For most of Earth’s history, life had been microscopic. Bacteria and other single-celled organisms had occupied the planet for billions of years, quietly transforming its oceans and atmosphere. Then, during the Ediacaran, large, multicellular organisms began appearing in the fossil record.
Some resembled fronds, discs, tubes, cushions or segmented mattresses. Others looked so unlike living organisms that we are still debating where—or whether—they belong on the modern tree of life.
These soft-bodied communities are collectively known as the Ediacara Biota, and the fossils discovered in the Mackenzie Mountains of the Northwest Territories are giving us an extraordinary new look at this evolutionary experiment.
A LOST SEAFLOOR IN THE CANADIAN NORTH
The fossils come from the lower Blueflower Formation near Sekwi Brook, a remote area of the Mackenzie Mountains. We've recovered more than 100 specimens from rocks that once formed part of a deep marine slope on the ancient continent of Laurentia—the continental core upon which much of present-day North America would eventually assemble.
The collection includes several organisms normally associated with what palaeontologists call the White Sea assemblage, a particularly diverse phase of Ediacaran life traditionally dated to between about 559 and 550 million years ago.
The Canadian fossils appear to be older.
Radiometric dates from nearby rock units, combined with their position in the geological sequence, indicate that the fossil-bearing beds may be close to 567 million years old. If that interpretation is correct, these organisms were living five to ten million years earlier than comparable communities were previously thought to have appeared.
Ten million years may seem an almost comically imprecise appointment by human standards. If someone tells you they will meet you for coffee sometime within the next ten million years, I would advise ordering without them.
In evolutionary history, however, pushing the appearance of complex behaviours back by several million years is significant. It changes how we understand the timing, geography and environmental setting of early animal evolution.
The fossils also include six groups not previously documented in North America, connecting this Canadian site with Ediacaran communities found in places such as Russia, South Australia and Namibia.
Apparently, even 567 million years ago, life was already more widely travelled than many of us.
MEET THE QUILTED BATHMAT
Among the most intriguing fossils is Dickinsonia, one of the great celebrities of the Ediacaran—although celebrity looked considerably flatter in those days.
Dickinsonia had an oval, segmented body that could range from a few millimetres to well over a metre in length, depending upon the species and specimen. Its repeated rib-like units gave it the appearance of a quilted cushion, a bathmat or perhaps a very ambitious pancake.
For many years, scientists debated whether Dickinsonia was an animal, a fungus, a giant single-celled organism, a lichen or a member of an entirely extinct branch of life.
Chemical evidence preserved in some specimens, including cholesterol-related molecules associated with animals, has strengthened the argument that Dickinsonia belonged somewhere within the animal kingdom.
It did not possess an obvious mouth, gut, head or limbs. Instead, it may have absorbed nutrients through the underside of its body as it moved across microbial mats covering the seafloor.
Fossilized impressions sometimes occur alongside patches where the microbial mat appears to have been disturbed or consumed. These “feeding traces” suggest that Dickinsonia did not simply sit in one place looking decorative. It moved from one patch of food to another.
This was not movement in the style of a cheetah, a salmon or even an especially motivated snail. There was no dramatic pursuit, no snapping of jaws and certainly no soundtrack.
But movement directed toward food represents behaviour. It means an organism could interact with its surroundings, respond to opportunity and relocate its remarkably bathmat-like self when dinner required it.
The Mackenzie Mountain specimens may extend the known record of such mobile animals by millions of years.
ENTER THE SEAFLOOR SCRAPER
Then there is Kimberella.
This low, oval organism possessed a more clearly defined front and back than many of its Ediacaran neighbours. It may have had a muscular foot and moved across the seafloor in a manner somewhat comparable to a mollusc.
Scientists have found distinctive scratch-like feeding traces called Kimberichnus associated with Kimberella. These marks were probably produced as the animal scraped or raked microbial material from the seafloor.
At Sekwi Brook, both the body fossil and its characteristic traces occur within the ancient community. Together, they provide compelling evidence that Kimberella lived and fed in this deep-water environment rather than being washed in from somewhere shallower.
Whether Kimberella was a true mollusc, a close relative of molluscs or something branching near the base of the bilaterian family tree remains debated. Bilaterians are animals with broadly symmetrical left and right sides—a sprawling evolutionary club that eventually came to include worms, insects, molluscs, dinosaurs and ourselves.
If Kimberella was an early bilaterian, then it represents an important step toward the more mobile, muscular and behaviourally complex animals that would flourish during the Cambrian.
It also suggests that the ancient seafloor had acquired its own small cleaning crew.
No eyes. No teeth. No tiny branded apron. Just a soft-bodied scraper working methodically across the microbial buffet.
I think of it as the Ediacaran’s plecostomus—Hypostomus plecostomus, the suckermouth catfish, or common pleco—merrily scraping away. No relation, of course, but I cannot shake the association from my mind.
AND THEN THERE WAS SEX—PROBABLY
The wonderfully provocative part of our story belongs to Funisia.
Funisia was a tube-shaped organism that lived attached to the seafloor, often in dense clusters. Individuals grew close together, forming communities that might have resembled stands of narrow marine tubes rising from the sediment.
Previous research on similarly sized clusters of Funisia from South Australia suggested that the organisms may have reproduced sexually through synchronized spawning. Modern corals and other marine animals use a comparable strategy, releasing eggs and sperm into the surrounding water at roughly the same time.
We cannot, of course, observe an Ediacaran spawning event directly. No fossil preserves a discreet little sign reading, “Reproduction underway—please give the tubes some privacy.”
The interpretation comes from the organisms’ distribution, size patterns and colonial growth. The evidence suggests that Funisia may have reproduced through waterborne stages, perhaps dispersing offspring or larvae over considerable distances.
The Canadian fossils show that Funisia was not confined to South Australia, as once thought. Its presence on Laurentia supports the idea that some Ediacaran organisms could disperse across ancient oceans.
One specimen from the Blueflower Formation may also record an early stage of branching growth.
So, while the site does not preserve sex itself, it contains a member of a lineage associated with some of the earliest evidence for sexual reproduction among complex organisms.
Sex, it appears, may be nearly as old as awkwardness—though awkwardness, being soft-bodied, has left a frustratingly poor fossil record.
LIFE BELOW THE LIGHT
The depth of the Canadian site may be just as important as the age of its fossils.
White Sea communities were previously best known from comparatively shallow marine environments.
The Blueflower fossils, however, lived on a deeper continental slope, probably below the photic zone—the depth to which sufficient sunlight penetrates for photosynthesis.
This was not a bright tropical reef. It was a dark offshore world beyond the regular disturbance of waves and storms.
At first glance, deep water might seem an inhospitable nursery for early animals. Yet it may have offered one considerable advantage: stability.
Shallow environments can experience rapid changes in temperature, oxygen, currents and storm activity. Deeper settings may remain more consistent over time. That stability could have provided early animals with an environment in which new body plans and ecological strategies could develop.
The discovery supports a fascinating possibility: some early animal groups may have become established offshore and later expanded into shallower environments.
That is the reverse of a pattern commonly observed later in the fossil record, when evolutionary innovations often appear first in shallow, nearshore habitats before spreading into deeper water.
Early animal evolution may not have followed the rules we derived from its descendants.
This is one of the delights of palaeontology. The rocks are under no obligation whatsoever to respect our favourite theories.
PRESERVING THE IMPROBABLE
Finding these fossils is remarkable because the organisms had few hard parts—or none at all.
Bones, teeth and shells fossilize relatively readily because their mineralized tissues resist decay and destruction. Soft bodies normally collapse, decompose or become someone else’s lunch long before burial can preserve them.
Ediacaran fossils required exceptional circumstances. Organisms had to be covered quickly by sediment, and microbial mats may have helped stabilize their impressions. Even then, what remains is often a faint outline, ridge or textured surface rather than a conventional body fossil.
Researchers examined the Blueflower specimens using carefully controlled lighting and Reflectance Transformation Imaging. This technique combines photographs taken with light coming from different directions, allowing subtle surface details to be examined digitally.
In palaeontology, lighting is everything. A fossil that looks like an unremarkable slab beneath flat light can suddenly reveal the ghost of an organism when illuminated from the side.
The specimens collected during the study are housed at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, where these ancient residents of the North remain in the North.
BEFORE THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION
The Mackenzie Mountain fossils also help soften the old idea that complex animal life appeared suddenly during the Cambrian Explosion, beginning around 539 million years ago.
The Cambrian remains one of the most spectacular evolutionary intervals in Earth history. Animals developed mineralized skeletons, increasingly complex sensory systems, new feeding strategies and an impressive assortment of grasping, burrowing, swimming and biting equipment.
But it was not a beginning from nothing.
The Ediacaran world was already experimenting with movement, symmetry, feeding, reproduction, ecological communities and relationships between organisms and their environments.
The Cambrian Explosion had a prelude.
It was quiet, soft-bodied and frequently shaped like household furnishings, but it mattered.
The Blueflower fossils suggest that the transition from the older Avalon communities to the more diverse White Sea organisms was not necessarily a sharp replacement. The two groups may have overlapped in time and environment, pointing toward a more gradual evolutionary progression.
Evolution rarely arrives on cue, neatly replaces the previous cast and pauses for scientists to label the scene. It branches, overlaps, experiments and leaves us to reconstruct the performance hundreds of millions of years later.
THE SEAFLOOR THAT CHANGED THE STORY
Some 567 million years ago, the ancient seafloor of northern Laurentia hosted a community unlike anything alive today.
Dickinsonia moved across microbial mats, absorbing food beneath its quilted body.
Kimberella crept and scraped, leaving evidence of purposeful feeding behind it.
Funisia gathered in tubular communities and may have relied upon a reproductive strategy capable of carrying new generations across ancient seas.
None had bones. None had teeth. None could have imagined trilobites, dinosaurs, mammoths or palaeontologists hiking through the Mackenzie Mountains in search of their faint impressions.
Yet within these soft bodies were some of the behaviours that would come to define animal life: movement, feeding, environmental awareness, community and reproduction.
The ancient Canadian seafloor was not empty and it was not waiting for the Cambrian to make life interesting.
It was already alive with evolutionary possibility.
Soft, strange and quietly getting on with the complicated business of becoming an animal.
The 2026 research was published by Scott D. Evans, Erik A. Sperling, Kimberly V. Lau and Justin V. Strauss in Science Advances as “Discovery of White Sea assemblage fossils from Laurentia.”
Additional information sourced from the American Museum of Natural History, and an institutional research article published by Dartmouth’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences on June 9, 2026.
If you're seaching for it, it is not a separate scientific study; it explains the same peer-reviewed Science Advances paper in accessible language.
Dartmouth is directly connected to the research through Dr. Justin Strauss, an associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Dartmouth. Strauss was a co-corresponding author of the scientific paper and led the expedition that recovered the fossils from the Mackenzie Mountains.
