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(8/8) Check out the full study here www.nature.com/articles/s41...: to learn more, including the other ways Spriggina could move besides just bending. Thanks so much @alexboersma-art.bsky.social for the amazing animation in post #1!!

(7/8) This preference is what biologists call behavioral lateralization, or handedness – found in everything from humans to insects today. Our study represents the oldest fossil evidence of an animal with this kind of preference, even before the evolution of hands!

(6/8) This suggests Spriggina was motile! But what we didn’t expect to find was about twice as many specimens bent to the left as fossils compared with those bent to the right. Because fossils are mirror images of living organisms, this suggests it preferred to bend to the right in life.

(5/8) If Spriggina was bent by current or something that happened when it was buried, we would expect all specimens on the same bed to be bent in the same way. If instead it moved on its own, we would expect it not to care how the thing next to it moved and bend randomly – exactly what we found!

(4/8) A key to uncovering evidence of movement was excavated beds at NENP, layers of rock that record a single storm event that rapidly buried Ediacaran communities (like the one pictured here) preserving snapshots of the seafloor ~555 million years ago.

(3/8) So, we photographed, measured, and described as many as we could – more than 100 from the South Australia Museum and Nilpena Ediacara National Park (NENP) – that had been found in the 60+ years since it was first discovered to quantify evidence of movement

(2/8) Since it was first described in 1958 and named after famous South Australian paleontologist Reg Sprigg, people have noticed that many fossils of Spriggina are bent (like the one pictured here), suggesting it might have been able to move, but no one had been able to test this hypothesis.

(1/8) For #FossilFriday – What can ~555-million-year-old fossils tell us about the earliest animal behaviors? Excited to share a new article with Blakely Webb, @chemosymbiosis.bsky.social, Bill Parker & @marydroser.bsky.social in Scientific Reports investigating evidence of motility in Spriggina

This handedness may be a clue that Spriggina had a surprisingly advanced nervous system, giving new insights into how complex brains evolved! Read more about the findings, led by Scott Evans (@fossilslablab.bsky.social), an assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Museum.👇

Are you right- or left-handed? You may have something in common with this 550-million-year-old animal! 🤯 👉 Meet Spriggina—the world’s first “right-handed” animal! Long before dinosaurs, this little organism crawled along a slime-covered seafloor and preferred bending to the right.

Happy #FossilFriday from the invertebrate paleontology collections @amnh.org where the newest (and first!) fossil SLAB lab member, Postdoc Prescott Vayda, and Colorado College intern, Kevin Gallegos Hernandez, are investigating some strange creatures from the Devonian of Pennsylvania!

THE BONEY AWARDS - The award show for fossil records, May 27 at 7pm Bizzare awards, red carpet drama, and an interview with a paleontologist! + Games, Sketches and More! Stream and IRL tickets available here! www.caveat.nyc/events/scien... 🧪🔭

A new fossil site for #FossilFriday! Paleontologists just described a new Ediacaran site in Northwest Canada that preserves the earliest evidence of complex critters like Dickinsonia that crawled along the ancient seafloor. Latest for @sciam.bsky.social: www.scientificamerican.com/article/thes...

Check out the paper and follow this account for more updates on our research into Earth’s oldest animals and other soft-bodied fossils at the @amnh.org

These fossils were found in the Mackenzie Mountains of Northwest Territories, Canada in significantly older and deeper water environments than the have been previously recognized, suggesting these earliest complex animals had a deep water origin linked to the stability of these environments

For the first time in North America we report classic members of the Ediacara Biota: from the flat, modular and motile Dickinsonia (pictured here) to the tubular, sexually reproducing Funisia to the possible early mollusk Kimberella and the eight-armed Eoandromeda

Excited to share our new paper out today in Science Advances describing some familiar Ediacaran fossils (beautifully reconstructed by Alex Boersma) in an unfamiliar place! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...