17 August 2019 | New Scientist | 31Exhibition
First Animals
Oxford University Museum
of Natural History
Until 24 February 2020
IT CAME to be known as Darwin’s
dilemma: why did animal life
appear abruptly in the fossil record
542 million years ago, having left
no trace in earlier rocks? In his book
On the Origin of Species, Charles
Darwin admitted: “I can give no
satisfactory answer.” The origin of
animals was duly elevated to one
of the great mysteries of evolution.
In the past few decades, the
mystery has been solved. Animals
didn’t appear in the blink of an eye
during the “Cambrian explosion”,
but evolved gradually in the
Precambrian, the so-called “long
fuse” of the Cambrian explosion.
Even so, the origin of animal life
remains one of palaeontology’s
most interesting and contentious
questions, and the fossils telling the
story are among the world's most
famous and fascinating.
Many of the best are on display in
a small, rather beautiful exhibition
called First Animals at the Oxford
Museum of Natural History. It is a
rare, possibly unique, chance to see
specimens from the world’s three
most important Cambrian explosion
fossil sites side-by-side. For anyone
fascinated by that time and its
amazing cast, it is a must-see.
The stars of the show are
55 fossils from the Chengjiang
deposit in China, a site that since
its discovery in 1984 has surpassed
the better-known Burgess Shale
in Canada in scientific importance.
The fossils are exceptionally well
preserved, like those found in the
Burgess Shale, but at 518 million
years old they are 10 million years
older, putting them right in the
thick of the evolutionary action.
The Burgess Shale, in contrast,
represents the calm after the storm,
once the full range of modern
animal groups had evolved.
Many of the Chengjiang fossils
have never been seen outside China
before. “It was like Christmas,” says
museum palaeontologist Duncan
Murdoch, recalling opening the box
when it arrived on loan from Yunnan
University in China.
Burgess Shale fossils are also on
show, plus some from a lesser-
known but equally important site in
Greenland called Sirius Passet. Then
there are casts of Ediacaran fossils,
representatives of an ecosystem of
large animals that lived long before
the Cambrian. “I think this is the first
time material representing so many
different stages of animal evolution
has been brought together,” says
Imran Rahman, a research fellow
at the museum.
The science providing the show’s
context is explained well, tackling
arcane material such as molecular
clocks and developmental genetics,though there is no mention of the
Doushantuo deposit, also in China,
which some palaeontologists say
preserves the very earliest animals.
For kids small and big, there is an
interactive exhibit allowing you to
explore the Cambrian ocean in a
submersible.
This is a brave exhibition to stage.
Compared with, say, feathered
dinosaurs or extinct marine reptiles,
the fossils are small and relatively
uncharismatic. The nearest thing
to a mega-beast is Amplectobelua,
the top predator in the Chengjiang
ecosystem, which cruised above the
sea floor and shredded prey with its
vicious spiny claws. It was as big
and fierce as anything in the ocean
at the time, yet still only about the
size of a living langoustine.
But as Murdoch says, good
things come in little packages. The
extraordinary detail of preservation
seen in some of the fossils is a thing
of wonder. These animals are more
than half a billion years old yet
their eyes, gills, legs, internal organs
and even muscles are intact. For a
glimpse of life right at the start of
the age of animals, you can’t ask
for anything better than this. ❚Early worm: Cricocosmia
jinningensis had a spiny
proboscis and a long trunk OX
FORD
UNIVERSITYM
US
EUM^ OF^ NAT
URAL
HI
ST
ORYHow animals began
There is a rare chance to see the fossils that best tell the amazing
story of how animal life appeared, says Graham Lawton
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