Keretsa brutoni
Ediacaran
Late Precambrian (Vendian)
Zimnie Gory Formation
White Sea Coast, Russia.

Problematica. Ediacaran. Soft-bodied.

Another mysterious animal from about 15 million years before the Cambrian explosion.  Unfortunately, none of the known specimens of Keretsa are sufficiently preserved to confidently assign it to a particular group though it resembles Naraoia, an arthropod of the Burgess Shale.

What do you do when the scientists don’t know how to classify it? All we can add is that it appears to have been unique in its own time. We at the Natural Canvas say, “Always buy the weird thing.”

The Vendian Period spans the last 110 million years of the Proterozoic Eon from about 540 to 650 million years ago.  It is the time that macroscopic life appeared – best known from areas like the Ediacara Hills, Australia, Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, and the White Sea.  By the end of the Vendian the supercontinent, Rodinia, which formed from the collisions of land masses approximately 1.2 billion years ago, had started to fragment into continents that would reconnect over 300 million years later at the end of the Paleozoic Era.

A Wikipedia article can be found here: Keretsa on Wikipedia

Read the original paper where Keretsa is described here: Keretsa Paper