In 1946, the Australian government sent a geologist to inspect the abandoned mines in the Ediacara Hills. This man, Reg Sprigg, discovered a hillside covered in pieces of weathered sandstones that to him looked very old. These pieces were very flat, as if they were fragments of an ancient seafloor surface.
He then remembered the fossils he saw near Adelaide, beautifully preserved on similar pieces of sandstones. Even though paleontologists said that flipping sandstone rocks is unlikely to reveal any fossil, he wanted to investigate the pieces in Ediacara anyway. Sure enough, he then discovered a circular pattern on one of the rocks that he suspected were the remains of a jellyfish-like creature. In a paper he published in a scientific journal, he gave this palm-sized fossil the name Ediacaria.
To his disappointment, the world responded with a disheartening silence. No one had ever discovered any traces of life beyond minute organisms from rocks as old as the ones in the Ediacara Hills. Sprigg's fossil, the world proclaimed, was merely residues of inorganic reactions instead of the body of a living creature. For decades, Sprigg and his “jellyfish” were largely ignored by scientists.
