The Avalon explosion
Large, strange, frond-like organisms appear in the deep sea — the first complex life visible to the eye.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 14 million years
- Known to
- ± 5 million years
- Era
- Neoproterozoic, Proterozoic
From about 574 million years ago the Avalon assemblage, preserved in Newfoundland and Charnwood Forest, records rangeomorphs and arboreomorphs: fractally branching fronds up to two metres tall, anchored to the seafloor below the reach of light. Charnia, found by a schoolgirl in 1957, was the fossil that finally proved complex life predated the Cambrian. Nothing alive today has quite the same body plan.