"Welsh Rocks Reveal Earth's Earliest Creatures"
Fossils discovered in Welsh rocks in the 1970s have been dated to 564 million years ago, revealing details about some of Earth's earliest creatures. The disc-shaped invertebrates, found in Carmarthenshire, likely lived in shallow waters along the coast of volcanic islands during the Ediacaran period. These ancient organisms, too primitive to be described as animals, are unlike any other forms of life and are considered the oldest in Wales. The breakthrough in dating the fossils was due to the work of a Pembrokeshire-born PhD student, Tony Clarke, who has been working on radiometric dating at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.