Description

Inaria sp.
Ediacaran
Late Precambrian (Vendian)
Penega Formation
East Angelsk, White Sea, Russia

80mm on 150mm slab. Rare.

Inaria is a genus of ancient animal known from the Vendian of Russia and Australia. It has been informally described as a sea anenome-like creature with a tapering tube that extended up into the water column. It might be a very early cnidarian.

Its claim to fame is that it was honored on an Australian stamp in 2005 but they could’ve gone with a better title than “Creatures of the Slime.”

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inaria

The Vendian Period spans about the last 110 million years of the Proterozoic Eon from about 540 to 650 million years ago.  It is during this time of the appearance of soft-bodied, macroscopic organisms, the fossils of which have been preserved at only a few sites worldwide.  By the end of the Vendian the supercontinent, Rodinia, which formed from the collisions of the major land masses approximately 1.2 billion years ago, had started to fragment into continents that would reconnect at the end of the Paleozoic Era over 300 million years later.