The Oldest Metazoa in the World

最近，在冰川国家公园的贝尔特超级群中发现了可能是软体动物的印象。现有的材料太少，保存也很差，无法令人信服地证明这些标记是后生动物的起源。探索性的野外工作将在博物馆藏品的产地进行，希望能找到这些可能的后生动物的更确切的标本。如果这些标本确实是后生动物，那么已知最古老动物的年龄将从大约7亿年延长到14亿年。

Recently, impressions of what may be soft-bodied animals have been discovered in USNM collections from the Belt Supergroup in Glacier National Park. Existing material is too scanty and poorly preserved to convincingly document that the markings are of metazoan origin. Exploratory field work will be conducted in the area from which the museum collections were made, in hopes of finding more definitive specimens of these possible metazoans. If the specimens do indeed represent metazoans, the age of the oldest known animals would be extended from about 700 to 1400 million years.