LOS ANGELES: A University of Oregon researcher is arguing that animals on land may not have come from the sea, which most scientists believe to be the case. Gregory Retallack has said that his studies have uncovered that ancient multicellular fossils believed to have been ancestors from early marine life are in fact the remnants of other land lichen or microbial colonies. According to a report in Science Recorder, Retallack pointed to Ediacaran fossils “as evidence that land creatures may not have come from the sea.” Ediacaran fossils date back 542-635 million years. “They have been thought of as fossil jellyfish, worms and sea pens, but this researcher says that Ediacaran fossils are preserved in ways that are completely different from marine invertebrate fossils. Ediacaran fossils are located in iron-colored impressions like planet fossils and microbes in fossil soils,” the report said. Retallack then looked closer at those ancient Ediacaran soils with an assortment of high-tech chemical and microscopic techniques in order to come to his new and controversial findings. The University of Oregon researched noted that the soils with fossils “are distinguished by a surface called ‘old elephant skin,' which is best preserved under covering sandstone beds." “This discovery has implications for the tree of life, because it removes Ediacaran fossils from the ancestry of animals," said Retallack, who is a professor of geological sciences and co-director of paleontological collections at the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History. “These fossils have been a first-class scientific mystery," he posited in a statement revealing his findings. “They are the oldest large multicellular fossils. They lived immediately before the Cambrian evolutionary explosion that gave rise to familiar modern groups of animals." Retallack came to the conclusion that the Ediacaran fossils in Australia's red-rock ranges were unfamiliar with the sea because he determined that the ancient organisms preferred “unfrozen, low salinity soils, rich in nutrients, like most terrestrial organisms." Ediacaran fossils symbolize “an independent evolutionary radiation of life on land that preceded by at least 20 million years the Cambrian evolutionary explosion of animals in the sea," he added.
