More About Charnia
Fifty years ago, in 1957, some of the world’s oldest fossils of complex living things were discovered in Charnwood Forest to the North of Leicester. The fossils are thought to be around 560 million years old.
These fossils are very important. They come from a period of time known as the Precambrian, and they were the first complex fossils in the world to be recognised from this time period. Before this, scientists thought that complex living things hadn’t evolved until later.
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This is how we think Charnia may have looked when it was alive. No one is really sure what kind of living things the fossils actually were. They were probably a kind of animal like a coral, but might have been plants, or even fungi. |
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In April 1957, 16-year-old Leicester Wyggeston Boys’ School student Roger Mason and his two friends Richard Allen and Richard Blachford while climbing in an old quarry in Charnwood Forest, noticed some unusual imprints in the rock surface. Roger knew enough geology to know that these Precambrian rocks were supposed to be too old to contain fossils. However, what they had found certainly looked like a fossil of some sort. When Dr. Trevor Ford of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester went to the quarry to see the impressions in the rock, he realised that Roger and his friends had indeed discovered Precambrian fossils. |
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The Museum made arrangements to collect the fossils, and in January 1958 this was done with the assistance of quarrymen from the Mountsorrel Granite Company. Later that year, Trevor Ford gave the fossils their scientific names. The main frond-like form he called Charnia masoni after Charnwood Forest and Roger Mason, while the discs he called Charniodiscus concentricus, referring to their disc-like shape with concentric rings. |
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More fossils have been found in Charnwood Forest following the discoveries of fifty years ago. Most of the fossils are disc shaped impressions. Some of these may be the imprints of the soft body of jellyfish, but most are now thought to be “holdfasts”, similar to the disc at the base of Charniodiscus. Some of the fossils are made up of fronds like Charnia, and in some it appears that several fronds may have been attached to one disc. Some impressions are very faint, and it is very hard to make out what kind of animal or plant might have left them. |
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Precambrian fossils like those of Charnwood Forest are now known from a number of places all around the world; Scientists have found Charnia and Charniodiscus in Canada, Russia and Australia. These fossils are now known as the Ediacaran assemblage. The range of Ediacaran fossils from around the world includes discs and fronds, like those of Leicestershire, along with other apparently more complex forms. This map shows the world in the time of the Ediacaran fossils... |
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...and where they have been found in today’s world. Maps modified from global maps created by Prof. Ron Blakey of Northern Arizona University http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/globaltext2.html |