Multicellular life you could see
Centimetre-scale organisms grow on the seafloor 1.56 billion years ago.
- When
- Known to
- ± 20 million years
- Era
- Mesoproterozoic, Proterozoic
The Gaoyuzhuang Formation in North China preserves flat, regularly shaped fossils up to 30 centimetres long and 8 centimetres wide — decimetre-scale multicellular eukaryotes, almost certainly photosynthetic. Nothing else of that size is known for another 900 million years. They show that large, differentiated organisms had already evolved long before the Ediacaran, even if they did not persist.