Movement

Six hundred and fifty million years ago, there were no animals or plants on the earth. The sea floor is covered with a soft layer of life, like a huge film against the rock bed. They don't hunt, they don't take root, they don't run and they don't bloom. Just follow the slow rise and fall of the ocean current and breathe in the sea water. Paleontologists call this period of time the Ediacaran Period and call those things Dickinsonia. In fact, they have nothing to do with jellyfish, and they may not be the direct ancestors of any later life. That was an era before evolution had yet to take sides. Movement and stillness, predation and photosynthesis, nerves and vasculature, all the oppositions that would later split life on earth in two, were then crowded into the same cytoplasm. Like a coin that hasn't been tossed yet. Then came the Cambrian period. The coin smashed into the ocean floor. Life begins to diverge: one grows into a plant and stops in place waiting for sunlight; the other evolves into an animal and moves to chase its prey. The coin was pressed deep into the earth by 650 million years of sediments. It was not until humans built a deep-sea mining station in the mud of the Mariana Trench that they dug it out again...