Did you know how strange organisms were when life got big?

The strangeness of the organisms of the Ediacara Biota – the oldest fossils in the geological record large enough to be seen with the naked eye – is mesmerising. They suddenly emerged out of nowhere 565 million years ago – and the first ones are already up to two meters tall. They look so alien and weird that scientists argued for 70 years what they were: the first experiments of trying to make an animal, lichens, extinct experiments in large size, bacterial colonies, or even giant single-celled protists? Some have truly unusual symmetries: Tribrachidium has threefold symmetry, Eoandromeda looks like a spiral galaxy with eight arms, and some are even constructed like a fractal. Modern life does not do that – no wonder scientists were fighting about what they were.  

The future “Early Life” pop-up book can be a diorama into the shallow waters of an Ediacaran sea showing these weird wonders. There are blue green algal mats covering the ocean floor, Dickinsonia is lying lazily around looking like a ribbed bath mat absorbing food through its skin, shiny dark-green balls of Beltanelliformis pop up, a fractal Charnia reaches high in the water, and among all this Kimberella moves slowly across the sea floor, eating the mat and leaving little poo pallets behind (the first creature with a mouth and a gut). The future app will animate the scene (Beltanelliformis balls bobbing up and down, Charnia waving with the current, Kimberella crawling and eating, Dickinsonia being lazy). It is a garden of Ediacara, no one is eating no one else yet. And we get the latest information about each creature: it appears that many competing scientists were all correct, these weird wonders are in fact a mixture – fossil cholesterol extracted from fossil Dickinsonia show it was indeed an animal, but a weird one that absorbed food through its belly; Kimberella was a slug-like higher animal already; Beltanelliformis was not a sea anemone or jellyfish but a round big colony of cyanobacteria. We also know from molecules in rocks that the microbial mats were made up of algae and cyanobacteria, not just cyanobacteria alone… Who wouldn’t want to explore such a world? — Professor Jochen Brocks (ANU Research School of Earth Sciences)

Meet the scientist: Professor Jochen Brocks

The ULTRA-PERCEPTION project reimagines the book as a traditional medium, physical object and traditional knowledge broker, by amplifying it into an interactive, technologically-empowered tool for intergenerational discovery and learning. Supported by KINETIC – a funding scheme for “for game-changing new ideas” piloted in 2023 by ANU Physics, the ANU MakerSpace, Wizer and Compton School – we create a prototype of what will hopefully become a series of research-based pop-up books that are accompanied by an augmented reality app. Five of our initial six pop-up spreads, which can later be rolled out into individual books, are dedicated to specific research themes ranging from the research field of Environmental Humanities to Synthetic Biology. By hovering a prototype app, created by the Canberra animation company Eye Candy, over these spreads, the science-based pop-up pages come to life – through art and technology, awe and wonder. A new science experience!