The new national park preserving Earth’s earliest life.
This video resource is best suited to Year 8 Earth and Space students learning about fossils on Earth and how, right here in Australia, they can be used to learn about the dawn of animal life.
Video Length: 9:29 mins
Drone footage courtesy of Associate Prof Diego C. García-Bellido (South Australian Museum/University of Adelaide).
If you climbed down through the branches of the evolutionary tree, from child to parent for countless generations, you would eventually meet the greatest-grandparent of us all. But when did that animal evolve? And would we know it when we saw it?
The new Nilpena Ediacara National Park, six hours north of Adelaide, South Australia, is home to fossils that may help us answer some of these questions. Its dusty red hillsides offer an exclusive window into the world at the dawn of animal life, and in July this year, Cosmos was invited up to visit.
We spent time with palaeontologists, parks staff and landowners to discover exactly why this national park is such a globally significant place.
An accompanying story is published in Cosmos issue 92.
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