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Mawsonites is a fossil genus dating to the Ediacaran Period, from 635–539 million years ago during the Precambrian era. The type species is Mawsonites spriggi. The names derive from South Australian geologists Douglas Mawson and Reg Sprigg.
The type species is Mawsonites spriggi, named after South Australian geologist Douglas Mawson, and his student at the University of Adelaide, Reg Sprigg, later a notable geologist himself. It was named by Martin Glaessner and Mary Wade in 1966.
Sprigg had labelled the fossil in 1958 as "Unnamed jellyfish". Mawsonites has been theorised to represent algae holdfasts, jellyfish, a filter feeder, a burrow, a microbial colony, or invertebrate tracks.
Sprigg's fossils are highly significant, as they represent the first discovery of an assemblage of multicellular biota from rocks of an epoch later called the Ediacaran, derived from the hills where discovered. The Edicaran biota show the earliest stages of animal evolution, which were quite distinct from the later Cambrian fossils.
The National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D. C. holds a cast of the fossil.
(2025). 9780789489845, Dorling Kindersley. ISBN 9780789489845 Several of these possibilities would indicate that Mawsonites represents a trace fossil, not an organism. Its biological affinities were also called into question amid suggestions that it might represent a mud volcano or other sedimentary structure, but further research showed that these structures could not satisfactorily account for its complexity.
Discovery and significance
The fossil was found in fossil beds discovered in 1946 by Reg Sprigg in the Ediacara Hills, around west of Beltana in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. The site is now part of Nilpena Ediacara National Park, and part of a bid for World Heritage Site listing
Examples
Mawsonites spriggii is held in the Sprigg Collection at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, South Australia.
See also
Further reading
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