Even without body parts that allowed for movement, new research shows -- for the first time -- that some of Earth's earliest animals managed to be picky about where they lived.

 

These creatures from the Ediacaran Period, roughly 550 million years ago, are strangely shaped soft-bodied animals that lived in the sea. Researchers have long considered them enigmatic.

 

"It's not like studying dinosaurs, which are related to birds that we can observe today," said Phillip C. Boan, UC Riverside paleontology graduate student and lead author of the new study. "With these animals, because they have no modern descendants, we're still working out basic questions about how they lived, such as how they reproduced and what they ate."