Emblematic fossils being damaged by vandalism.

The Ediacaran age was the latest to be recognised by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. It is characterised by a series of enigmatic fossils found at a handful of sites worldwide that were first discovered in the Ediacara Hills of South Australia in 1943. A decade or so later a group of English schoolboys found an important fossil site in a quarry at Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire. These fossils proved that antecedents of the Cambrian explosion had teemed in the seas before the great radiation of species, proving Darwin’s inference that earlier life than the Cambrian would soonor or later be discovered.

Madonna of the Magnificat, 1480, Sandro Botticelli