SGER: A Search for the Oldest Metazoan Trace Fossils in the Northern Hemisphere

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The importance of the project lies in the search for the oldest metazoan life on Earth. The age of the rocks surrounding the units with the metazoan traces in Wyoming range from 2.0 - 2.5 Byrs., indicating that this is the oldest evidence of metazoan life in North America. If our preliminary data are correct and the organic nature of the traces proves unequivocal, then molecular data of metazoan life will be closer in age to the rock evidence. Further, this would imply that the increase of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere at a level possibly enough to support Metazoan life must have taken place by 2.3 Byrs. Our expected results will have enormous implications to metazoan paleontology, sedimentary organic geochemistry, geochronology of fossil-bearing strata, and comparison of fossil and molecular data. It was once thought that "....the animals of the Ediacara fauna are so varied and some of them are so complex that metazoans must have existed, without leaving traces now known, for a very long earlier time." (G. G. Simpson, 1978, p. 101). We have a chance to prove that Simpson was right utilizing an integrated, full blown approach through a thorough, modern set of analyses.