‘Charnia’, believed to be around 560 million years in age, is the oldest fossil in the country, and one of the oldest in the world. The fossil itself looks like a leaf or a feather, but scientists are still trying to work out exactly what these prehistoric oddities were. Leicester schoolboy Roger Mason discovered the fossil 50 years ago in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire. He is now Professor at the China University of Geosciences. Since then, more fossils have been discovered in Charnwood Forest, but they are still rare with only a handful being known.

 

Said Dr Mark Purnell, University of Leicester Palaeontologist, ‘The fossils are so bizarre that people can’t decide whether they were very early relatives of animals alive today, or evolution’s first experiment at building complex bodies, an experiment that left no surviving descendants’.