Description
Eoandromeda octobrachiata
Vendian
Upper Doushantuo Formation
Wenghui, Jiangkou, Guizhou, China.
21mm on 93mm slab.
Ediacaran, Soft-bodied, Problematica.
Eoandromeda is a genus of early animal not assigned to a family, order, class, nor phylum. It is known from the Vendian of China and Australia (Ediacara sites). It is roughly circular with eight spiraling arms with closed-off ends. It has the very unusual distinction of being among the only Ediacaran animals preserved as both an impression of the body (Australia) and a carbonized compression (China). This has allowed a better understanding of the morphology of the animal because it is literally preserved in two completely different ways!
The Vendian Period spans about the last 110 million years of the Proterozoic Eon from about 540 to 650 million years ago – a time after a phase of global glaciation. It was during the Vendian that soft-bodied, macroscopic life appeared. By the end of the period, the supercontinent, Rodinia, which formed from the collisions of the major land masses approximately 1.2 billion years ago, had started to fragment. We would not recognize those continents until after they reconnected at the end of the Paleozoic and then drifted apart again during the Mesozoic.
