Fossil Friday: An Ediacaran Animal with a Question Mark
This Fossil Friday discusses Quaestio simpsonorum from the Late Precambrian of the Ediacaran biota in Australia, which is, well, actually I have no idea what it really is, and neither does anyone else, which makes its genus name very fitting indeed. Here is the backstory of these fossils that were discovered in the 555-million-year-old sandstones of Nilpena Ediacara National Park in the South Australian outback, and were reconstructed as inflated disc-shaped organisms that were floating over microbial mats on the ancient seafloor like a Roomba.
Just a few days ago the study by Evans et al. (2024) with the description of this fossil organism hit the news with sensationalist headlines like “Ancient ‘sea Roomba’ tells a 555-million-year-old story of our evolution” (Thompson 2024), or “Flinders fossil unlocks secrets of first animals on Earth” (Government of South Australia 2024), or “Florida State University scientist discovers one of the earth’s earliest animals in Australian outback” (Harris 2024), or “Enigmatic Fossil Shows Signs Of Being Earth’s First Animal” (Bressan 2024). It was boldly celebrated as “oldest evidence for complex, macroscopic animals” (de Lazaro 2024) and “the earliest moving animals” (Luntz 2024). Wow, that surely sounds like something important
Is It Really Based on Solid Evidence?
A first look at the images of the fossil is not very encouraging: The fossils look like structureless blobs, and many fossil collectors might not even have bothered to pick them up. Certainly the actual study showed much more significant details? No, not at all which is a real bummer. Even co-author García-Bellido explicitly admitted to IFLScience “that all we really know about Quaestio is the shape of its outsides” (Luntz 2024). Yes, you heard that right. All we know about this fossil is the shape, which is nothing more than a few-inch-large round impression with a question-mark-like fold in the middle that originates from a kind of notch. Are any organs visible that suggest that it was a multicellular animal? No. Any bilateral symmetry? No, but this does not prevent the scientists from speculating that in spite of the external asymmetry, it might have been a pioneer bilaterian ancestor, because humans are bilaterian animals and internally asymmetrical (authors quoted in de Lazaro 2024). You can’t make this stuff up: They seriously compare a Precambrian blob of jello with a highly derived modern human and claim that external asymmetry in the former and internal asymmetry in the latter could somehow correspond, even though the internal asymmetry of humans does not belong to the ground plan of vertebrate animals even according to mainstream evolutionary biology. This is ridiculous junk science, based on almost useless fossil evidence. Actually, there are even inorganic pseudofossils like salt pseudomorphs that look quite similar to this stuff. All the elaborate hypotheses in the new study are based on the simple circumstance that the structures in the stone seem to show some polarity. Here is news: almost every organism does show some polarity including most protists and plants. This is much ado about nothing.
What about the alleged evidence for motility? Are there any trace fossils that really document active motility? No, but again the scientists claim otherwise. Why? Because a few of the fossils have a similar shaped and similar sized impression close to them, which they interpret as evidence for active movement. However, such structures had been already described under the name Epibaion for the Ediacaran dickinsoniids and are highly controversial in their interpretation as I discussed in a previous article (Bechly 2018). I highly recommend to read the paragraph on these alleged trace fossils in this latter article of mine. While some experts indeed interpreted those structures as grazing traces, others considered the serial impressions as made by dead organisms displaced by slow currents before finally being buried. I personally observed the latter phenomenon in fossil dragonflies from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen limestone (see Tischlinger 2001). The alleged traces show no continuity and thus no evidence for motility. But who am I, or world leading experts like A. Yu Ivantsov (also see Brasier & Antcliffe 2008 and McIlroy et al. 2009), to disagree with some evolutionary biology graduate student’s views, who thinks that this is “a clear sign that the organism was motile” (Bressan 2024, Harris 2024)? What makes things worse is the whole house of cards of far-reaching hypotheses that are built on this dubious foundation. The authors for example speculate that “the presence of muscles and/or a nervous system based on inferred behaviors would, if verified, constitute further evidence of more advanced differentiation” (Evans et al. 2024). Problem is: they are not verified. There is not a shred of evidence for muscles or nervous systems in any of the fossils! There is not even valid evidence for the inferred behaviors from which the presence of muscles and nervous system was inferred. It is quite revealing for the poor state of evolutionary biology that such imaginative story-telling is not only allowed but apparently welcome in a peer-reviewed science journal titled Evolution & Development.
An “Animal” with a Question Mark
In short: There is neither any convincing evidence for a metazoan affinity of Quaestio, nor for its motility. It is truly an Ediacaran “animal” with a question mark! The much more obvious conclusion is that Quaestio is just another problematic organism of the Ediacaran biota that cannot be connected to any living group. Actually, the scientists themselves did not suggest a direct relationship with any living animals but rather compared Queastio with dickinsoniids, which are of highly questionable animal relationship themselves (Bechly 2018). Sure, Quaestio and dickinsoniids still could be placozoan or coelenterate grade animals, or xenacoelomorph flatworms, even though none of them agrees in size, shape, symmetry or anatomy, or any relevant diagnostic similarities. Thus, they could as well be giant protists (Vendobionta sensu Seilacher), or rather an independent extinct group of multicellular organisms, or almost anything else such as fungi or lichens. There are also similarities between Quaestio and the trilobozoan Ediacaran fossils like Tribrachidium that were initially misidentified as echinoderms, or to other circular Ediacaran fossils like Cyclomedusa (featured above) that were initially misidentified as jellyfish, but later reinterpreted as holdfasts or microbial colonies. We have no clue what all these Ediacaran biota organisms really were. To claim that such undefinable blobs in sandstone represent fossils of the oldest motile animals is massively overselling the evidence to say the least.
References
Bechly G 2018. Why Dickinsonia Was Most Probably Not an Ediacaran Animal. Evolution News September 27, 2018. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/why-dickinsonia-was-most-probably-not-an-ediacaran-animal/
Brasier M & Antcliffe J 2008. Dickinsonia from Ediacara: a new look at morphology and body construction. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 270, 311–323 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2008.07.018
Bressan D 2024. Enigmatic Fossil Shows Signs Of Being Earth’s First Animal. Forbes October 19, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2024/10/18/enigmatic-fossil-shows-first-signs-of-being-earths-first-animal/
de Lazaro E 2024. New Species of Complex Ediacaran Animal Discovered in Australia. SciNews October 17, 2024. https://www.sci.news/paleontology/quaestio-simpsonorum-13355.html
Evans SD, Hughes IV, Hughes EB, Dzaugis PW, Dzaugis MP, Gehling JG, García-Bellido DC & Droser ML 2024. A new motile animal with implications for the evolution of axial polarity from the Ediacaran of South Australia. Evolution & Development e12491, 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ede.12491
Government of South Australia 2024. Flinders fossil unlocks secrets of first animals on Earth. Environment SA News October 14, 2024. https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/news-hub/news/articles/2024/10/flinders-fossil-unlocks-secrets-of-first-animals-on-earth
Harris M 2024. Florida State University scientist discovers one of the earth’s earliest animals in Australian outback. Florida State University October 14, 2024. https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2024/10/14/florida-state-university-scientist-discovers-one-of-the-earths-earliest-animals-in-australian-outback/
Luntz S 2024. One Of The Earliest Moving Animals Had A Very Quizzical Shape. IFLScience October 22, 2024. https://www.iflscience.com/one-of-the-earliest-moving-animals-had-a-very-quizzical-shape-76460
McIlroy D, Brasier MD & Lang AS 2009. Smothering of microbial mats by macrobiota: implications for the Ediacara biota. Journal of the Geological Society 166, 1117–1121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/0016-76492009-073
Thompson B 2024. Ancient ‘sea Roomba’ tells a 555-million-year-old story of our evolution. New Atlas October 14, 2024. https://newatlas.com/biology/fossil-quaestio-evolution/
Tischlinger H 2001. Bemerkungen zur Insekten-Taphonomie der Solnhofener Plattenkalke. Archaeopteryx 19, 29–44.
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