The oldest mammal fossil on Earth, the Dickinson jellyfish

Dickenson jellyfish

Researchers have found fossils of one of the earliest known multicellular animals on Earth — a 550 million-year-old Dickenson jellyfish — on the roof of the Bhimbetka Rock Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh. Dickinson jellyfish, an extinct genus of basal animals, lived in a geographical area of the late Ediacaran period and is now divided into Australia, China, India, Russia and Ukraine.

Individuals of Dickenson jellyfish typically resemble a ribbed oval with symmetrical sides. It is only known that its fossils are imprints and castings in sandstone layers. Researchers at the Geological Society of India (GSI) in Nagpur, Maharashtra, point out that the specimens found in Bhimbetka are about 17 inches long, while the specimens found elsewhere in the world are more than 4 feet long.

The new fossils were discovered on the last day of the 36th International Geological Congress 2020 field trip organized by GSI last March. However, it took the team nearly a year to publish the findings.

Other team members involved in the study came from the University of Oregon, the National Operations Center, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the Geospatial Division, and the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. "Dickenson jellyfish are the earliest Edicara multicellular animal life ever discovered — a massive explosion of life on geological time scales that predates the Cambrian period (about 541 million years ago)," notes Merajuddin Khan, a senior geologist and member of the Nagapur GSI.

Paleontologists believe that these earliest creatures lived in warm shallow seas as early as 570 million years ago and are representative of the earliest complex life forms in the animal kingdom.