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Charnia was a ancient lifeform that grew on the deep sea floor more than 550 million years ago.
The rock formations in Charnwood forest where once regarded as too old to produce fossils. It is from this forest, with its extraordinarily ancient rock, that Charnia was discovered (and for which this early lifeform was named). Charnia was certainly not a plant – surviving at depths in the deep sea at which photosynthesis was not possible. What Charnia and other biota of the Ediacaran period were is not fully understood. Classification of this early life remains a subject of debate. Charnia has no living descendants. It has been suggested that the simple fractal branching exhibited in Ediacaran biota provided a mechanism to grow at unprecedented scale, but without the malleability to develop the complex body structures of later animals.Source