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A piece of fat has helped solve a riddle 558 million years old and seems ready to draw a college student to scientific celebrity.
When Professor Jochen Brocks received a call from a Russian student saying that he wanted to use his Canberra lab to extract large molecules from an old Ediacaran biocide fossil and prove that he was the first animal of the earth, he thought that the idea was crazy.
No scientist had been able to decipher what the weathered remains, called Dickinsonia, were from their discovery in the hills 650 kilometers north of Adelaide in 1946.
Fossil of Dickinsonia organically preserved from the White Sea region in Russia.
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"It's the holy grail of paleontology and a student called me from Moscow to tell me that he had a solution," Professor Brocks told AAP.
No matter Ilya Bobrovskiy, the young geologist told Professor Brocks that he knew such well-preserved fossils in a remote region of northwestern Russia that the organic tissue still contained cholesterol molecules, a type of fat characteristic of animal life.
"I just could not believe it exists anywhere in the world, I mean these things are really old, 558 million years," said Professor Brocks.
If this is true, the results could settle a quarrel between scientists on the strange leaf-shaped organism 1.4 meters long. Was it a giant unicellular amoeba, a lichen, a mushroom, an animal
"I thought it was a student with no idea of how (fossils) works, it's a completely crazy idea," said Professor Brocks.
"But he seemed to me very smart, I'll let him try it and when the project fails, I'll give it something else."
The 27-year-old man did not fail, with the support of Prof. Brocks, he was transported by helicopter to the White Sea area, where he was infested with bears and mosquitoes, where he was suspended from cliffs 100 meters high.
Dickinsonia's body is about 9 centimeters long.
Australian National University
"The data that he got were beautiful, they were full of fossil cholesterol." "It was an animal, it's the best evidence so far," said Professor Brocks.
"He has landed number one and is spreading across the country."
His efforts similar to those of Indiana Jones have also developed a new approach to study ancient fossils, which hold the key between the ancient world dominated by bacteria and the world of large animals appeared 540 million ago years ago during the Cambrian explosion.
The PhD student is currently working on a new research project with the Australian National University of the Northern Territory.
His research is published in the journal Science.
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