McMenamin Mark A.S. The Garden of Ediacara

Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, 311 p.The Garden of Ediacara presents a mesmerizing documentary of a major scientific discovery, detailing McMenamin's trip to Namibia, where, with a party that included the renowned paleontologist Adolf Seilacher, the author investigates a spectacular cast made from a colony of fossils in the Nama desert. He chronicles the long, often futile search made by earlier scientists for Ediacara, which began more than a century ago in Europe, North America, and Africa, and the various types of Ediacaran fossils that have been uncovered in the years since
McMenamin concludes that Ediacarans were not animals because they never passed through the ball-shaped embryonic stage peculiar to known animal life forms. But, remarkably, Ediacarans seem to have developed a central nervous system and a brain independent from animal evolution. This startling conclusion has profound implications for our understanding of evolutionary biology, for it indicates that the path toward intelligent life was embarked upon more than once on this planetMystery Fossil
The Sand Menagerie
Vermiforma
The Nama Group
Back to the Garden
Cloudina
Ophrydium
Reunite Rodinia!
The Mexican Find: Sonora
The Lost World
A Family Tree
Awareness of Ediacara
Revenge of the Mole Rats
Epilogue: Parallel Evolution