Charnia

A frond-shaped living thing from the Ediacaran sea floor.

Our sources give no reliable size for Charnia, so this outline of its body shape is not drawn to scale.

When: Ediacaran period, 635 to 538.8 million years ago
Where: Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, and elsewhere

A fern-like fossil frond pressed into grey rock. — Charnia masoni in Charnwood Forest rock, Leicestershire.Charnia masoni Leicestershire by Ghedo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized. This version is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 too.

In 1957 a fern-like impression in a rock in Charnwood Forest, near Leicester, turned out to be one of the oldest fossilised animals known. It was named Charnia masoni after Roger Mason, the Leicester schoolboy who brought it to light.

It lived fixed to the sea floor in the Ediacaran period, before the Cambrian explosion. Charnwood Forest is still one of the places palaeontologists go to study Ediacaran life.

Charnia: 635 to 538.8 million years ago. That is 14% of the way back to the Earth’s birth.Periods from the ICS chart

Found in Britain. See where Britain was at the time in Britain’s journey.

Also in early animals

Auroralumina attenboroughii Described by its finders as the earliest known animal predator
Anomalocaris A Cambrian predator with huge compound eyes
Wiwaxia A small, spiny, scaly animal from the Burgess Shale

Sources

British Geological Survey, 560-million-year-old fossil is first animal predator
International Commission on Stratigraphy, International Chronostratigraphic Chart, v2026/06