Ediacaran

Ediacaran

The Victorians couldn’t have known, of course,
The abundance of life in the lifeless rocks –
The explosion before the trilobytes,
With multicellular building blocks.
The fossils are rare, but they are there,
In Charnia and Kimberella.
What were they ?  We don’t quite know –
Foundation in the stony cellar.
Dickinsonia, Cyclomedusa,
You flourished, then you died away.
The Boring Billion birthed you all –
Our great ancestral stray.

Yet still the Paleozoic begins,
Long after the glories of Avalon.
That makes no sense, not now we know
What the Cambrian was built upon.
Dismissed as children’s stories,
We have had to wait a long long time –
Yet the Pre- was not so pre at all,
Its oceans teemed with some strange slime…
The end of the Cryogenian, that’s the border,
That’s when things got big –
Spriggina and Aspidella are waiting –
All we have to do is dig…