Description

Tribrachidium heraldicum Glaessner 1959
Precambrian
Penega Formation
East Angelsk, White Sea Russia

Superb 11mm specimen on 90mm x 130mm slab. Easily one of the best we have ever seen. Very rare.

Tribrachidium is a tri-radial genus of soft-bodied animal with wildly disputed affinities, ending up in a phylum of its own, Trilobozoa.  Many researchers have even left its placement in the animal kingdom as an open question.

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 that soft-bodied, macroscopic life appeared.  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.