Uwe-M. Troppenz THE NEW PRECAMBRIAN No „boring“, but bustling billions in a succession of evolutions and catastrophes “You must be able to follow your feelings, you must be free in your thoughts - but without fantasizing - and you must always stay curious.” (Abderrazak El Albani, University of Poitiers) 1 Tetrada © 2017 Tetrada Verlag, Parchim second edition 2017 ISBN 978-3-00-047871-0 updated and complemented text translated by Anita Müller, Karlstein 115 pictures and two chronological tables printed by Power Design & Druck, Parchim reprints only with the permission of the author photos, drawings, graphics: chapter “The revolution of the Gabonionta” Abderrazak El Albani (unless otherwise indicated) chapter “A new picture of the Precambrian” and “From the war between the creatures to the apocalypse“ Regina Troppenz (unless otherwise indicated) contact: www.palaeontologie-troppenz.de or [email protected] The cover picture shows fossils from the Franceville biota (big photo: A. El Albani) and fossils of the three big Precambrian biotas (photos: A. El Albani, France, Thomas Kapitany, Australia, Tomonori Kikushi, Japan) 2 Inhalt Preface 4 The revolution of the Gabonionta 7 Two billion years before our time 8 10 Who is Professor El Albani? Hundreds of life witnesses in clay shale 14 Franceville biota - pros and cons 18 What are the Gabonionta? 24 Chinese scientists: conserved cells! 28 Next proof: multicellular organisms in India 31 Anew picture of the Precambrian 35 Gabonionta and the consequences 35 Life after the hail of meteorites 40 Creative catastrophes 46 “Bustling billion” - no „boring billion” 52 Strings of beads and hairpins 56 Aparadise explodes 81 From the war between the creatures 90 to the apocalypse 90 Ediacaran in the Cambrian? 92 The traces are leading into a new world Two times Burgess: "Time capsules of life" 97 Chengjiang: clearance sale of predators 103 Astonishing structures in the Västervik basin 108 The almost exact dating of the end of the world 111 Acknowledgements 120 Some feedback from scientists 121 Book review 123 Literature 126 74/75 Chronological tables 3 Preface One of my theses in the first volume of my book “Wohin die Spuren füh- ren” (“Where the traces are leading to”) postulates the existence of the Montana biota before the Ediacara biota. This thesis has now been sup- ported in an impressive way. On 12 March 2014, a fossil exhibition ope- ned in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, displaying the “Gabonionta” - exhibits that drew a completely new picture of the Precambrian! According to scientists, the Gabonionta represent the first known ecosystem of the Earth. They were discovered in a 2.1-billion- year-old stratum near the city of Franceville in Gabon, Africa. On the one hand, this hitherto oldest example of biodiversity shows that complex life did indeed not originate only about 600 million years ago. On the other hand, it contradicts the theory of the great “emptiness” before that time, in which solely unicellular bacteria existed, which caused the reef-formation of the “stromatolites”. This premise had been the basis of any evaluation of the Precambrian world. Well, there seem to be quite some changes ahead. Still in 2014, the joint publication “Lebensspuren im Stein” (Rothe et al.) described life at that time to have been limited to “microbes, that is to say organisms with a relatively simple structure and of a low organisational level”. It continues: “It was not until the final stages of the Precambrian that fossils first provi- ded evidence of organisms with somewhat more complex structures.” Today, however, we know: there has been complex life for at least 2.1 bil- lion years. The Franceville biota, followed by the Montana biota and even- tually the well-known Ediacara biota, which gradually disappeared with the “Cambrian explosion”. As described in my book (mentioned above), the individual eras of the Earth’s history are limited by catastrophes that largely erased previous biospheres and created new animate worlds. This also applies to the time of the Gabon biota, which was marked by com- plete glaciation, big impacts and an oxygen collapse. The Franceville biota in Gabon was discovered by Prof. Abderrazak El Albani, a French- Moroccan scientist at the University of Poitiers, and his international team. In an exchange of letters, Prof El Albani expressed his agreement with the “Montana biota” with its living beings such as Horodyskia, which followed the Gabonionta. It was definitely conceivable as an era of transi- tory biota (“intermediate stages of life"), he wrote. 4 Professor Abderrazak El Albani at the finding place north-west of Franceville in Gabon - the story of life has to be re-written. The discovery of a world popula- ted by diverse living beings at a time for which science had ruled out complex life altogether, throws all theories overboard. And this does not happen with much “palaeopoetry”, but with clear “palaeofacts” - namely with “the fossil in one’s hand”, as Dr Z. Gába, a Czech geologist, once put it. Photo: Gabon Expression Almost exactly 100 years previously: Charles Doolittle Walcott (left) with his wife and daughter in 1913 in the world-famous Cambrian Burgess Shale in Canada, which he had discovered in 1909. By 1924, he had collected as many as 65,000 fossils. He used them to present to the marvelling world a complete- ly new picture of life in the Cambrian, which had been much more diverse than previously thought. Photo: Wikimedia Commons 5 So it seems that the prehistory of life - from the Earth’s formation to the “Cambrian Explosion”, introducing the modern era with its well-known fos- sils and recent living beings - must be rewritten. As far as I am concerned, this discovery makes El Albani even surpass Charles Walcott (1850- 1927). At the beginning of the past century, Walcott discovered the mid- Cambrian black shale sediment (“Burgess Shale”, 505 m years) near Fields, British Columbia, Canada. This discovery with its fossils with soft parts enabled Walcott to provide evidence of a considerably more diver- se habitat at that time than previously thought. Proof of complex life in the Mesoproterozoic and Paleoproterozoic: Charles Darwin would have been happy, for he was definitely aware of the large gaps in his Theory of Evolution. In his work “On the Origin of Species” (1859), he admitted with self-critical candour that he did not know why absolutely no fossils could be found from the days before the Cambrian. He had absolutely no solution to the problem of “why do we not find beneath the Cambrian system great piles of strata stored with the remains of the progenitors of the Cambrian fossils?” So where do the creatures of the “Cambrian Explosion”, that seemed to appear all of a sudden, come from? This question has now fairly been answered. On the other hand, we witness here a certain weakness in Darwin’s theo- ry. After all, he wrote in the same paper that “I view all beings not as spe- cial creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited”. Nevertheless, the 2.1-billion-year-old Gabon fossils do indeed represent a full biosphere in all its diversity, something which certainly nobody would have suspected. So where does t h i s diverse life come from, if Darwin was to be proved right? The “Cambrian Explosion” was, after all, the starting signal for a new age, that began 540 million years ago and led to human beings, who shape the world today. Whether we are going to be up to this great responsibility remains to be seen. But don’t worry - should the “Human Catastrophe” present itself on Earth, there will certainly be a successor biota at hand... Uwe-M. Troppenz, Parchim 2016 6 The revolution of the Gabonionta And once again, everything turns out to be completely different than pre- viously assumed. But actually, this palaeontological revolution was sheer coincidence. The French Embassy was the one to spark the revolution, originally inten- ding to enrich the partnership with the West-African state Gabon on a scientific level. Thus, it suggested to send a group of scientists into the Franceville region with its bedrock of Precambrian clay shale. Franceville, with its roughly 43,000 inhabitants, is Gabon’s third largest city and provincial capital of Haut-Ogooué. In recent years, it has experi- enced a significant economic upturn owing to the exploitation of manga- nese and uranium. Gabon is well-known for its special geological and mineralogical characteristics. The area around Franceville, for instance, is the type locality for nine minerals: Bariandite, Chervetite, Curienite, Francevillite, Lenoblite, Metavanuralite, Mounanaite, Schubnelite and Vanuralite. Of fossils, however, there was no mention... Nevertheless, in 2008, Professor Abderrazak El Albani, geologist and sedimentologist at the University of Poitiers, set out for Franceville; he was accompanied by his colleague Paul Sardini and his Gabonese stu- dent Frantz Ossa Ossa. With little financial means, as the undertaking did not appear in any research programme, a great deal of idealism was necessary. In his portrait on the website of the French University of Poitiers (27 September 2013), Prof El Albani explains in an extremely modest under- statement: “In the end, the credit for our discovery belongs to the embassy, as it took a marvellous initiative. My only contribution was that I reacted positively to their offer, leaving aside certain dogmas... However, a great deal of curiosity was involved, because we knew from experience that there was no chance of finding any life forms in that region - many explorers and researchers had been there in the course of the foregoing 25 years...” His comment about the regrettably low funds: “If you are not enthusiastic about it, then this profession is not the right thing for you anyway.” 7 Two billion years before our time With this attitude, one can really move mountains. And this is exactly what El Albani did. In an area where there seemed to be no hope of fin- ding any traces of ancient life, the Albani team made a find. And what is more: they did not find microbial mats or stromatolites, but best preserved multicellular and complex fossils of living beings, physi- cally handed down in clay shale - apparently a whole marine ecosystem and the very first example of biodiversity. Its age: 2.1 billion years! “In 2010, a report from the professional journal ‘Nature’ came as a bombshell” said a press release of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna on 11 March 2014. The reason being: “This 2.1-Gyr-old find revo- lutionized our ideas about the history of life on Earth.” (Press release of the University of Poitiers on 23 June 2014.) Even some newspapers des- cribed the situation with similar words in the year of the „Nature“ publica- tion. This description, however, stems partly from understandable wishful thin- king, and partly from journalistic dramatization. In reality, the experts loo- ked up only briefly from their beloved tomes, squinted over the top of their glasses and raised their eyebrows in slight uncertainty, only to comforta- bly go on delving into the traditional and established views. Some acti- vists at least made the effort to try to refute the findings, in order to put in its place the unruly attack to a once established and apparently consi- stent world view. But we come to that later. The “bombshell” ended in a silent “ploff” and, by and large, a dark veil of silence was drawn over the subversive discovery. Professor El Albani regretted this. During our exchange of letters, he wrote on 30 August 2014: “I take the liberty to say that the international scientific community is very ‘hesitant’. Certain scientists are trapped in a dogma and do not want to see that there was a life before Ediacara. Our research has demonstrated the opposite.” It is certainly not easy, continues El Albani, to accept completely new cir- cumstances in view of the established theories. But there are simply new scientific facts. 8 The finding place of the fossils lies north-west of the city of Franceville (photo below) in south-east Gabon. Images: Wikimedia Commons 9 Who is Professor El Albani? On its website, the University of Poitiers calls him “a researcher beyond the usual - curious by nature, but eternally dissatisfied”. Professor Abderrazak El Albani sees himself as a team player and likes attributing success to others. His passion for research and his unconven- tional ideas combine with the courage to make something apparently absurd a subject of discussion - willingly against the prevailing opinion. He is particularly annoyed by dogmas, blinkers, a lack of flexibility and insufficient willingness to accept new ideas. The worst for him is when facts are being ignored in favour of sustaining outdated visions. In that case, he may even criticize colleagues, as he did for instance in the CNRS journal on 25 June 2014: “To be honest - it is very difficult for cer- tain colleagues of the scientific community to admit that such early macrofossils might exist!” As a boy, he wanted to become a fighter pilot. He says that geology “seduced him only very late”. But then it did! “When the scientific fever hit me for the first time, I didn’t want to do anything else anymore.” Abderrazak El Albani was born in Marrakesh, Morocco - according to El Albani “the most beautiful city in the world”. He is the youngest of a total of ten siblings. Today, he is himself father of a ten-year-old son. From Marrakesh, El Albani went to France to go to university and his geologi- cal dissertation was accepted in 1995. After his doctorate, he spent three years to Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany (from 1996 to 1998), and finally signed on in 1999 at the laboratory for hydrogeology and soil sci- ence of the University of Poitiers, which is part of the “Centre national de la recherche scientifique” (CNRS), the national centre for scientific re- search. Its slogan: “Advancing the frontiers”. The title of professor followed in 2010, in the year in which his research results from Gabon were published. In the following months, little hap- pened in the scientific world and almost nothing in public, so El Albani took the initiative. He saw to a public exhibition of the fossils. After all, they represent a kind of paradigm shift, that is to say a transformation of basic conditions for the geology and palaeontology of the Precambrian and with that a complete reorientation regarding the early development stages of life and the evolution of the earthly biosphere itself. 10