Eesti Loodusmuuseum/Näitus/Müstiline ürgmeri/ENG

Estonia is a maritime nation. For a big part of the last 600 million years, the territory of Estonia has been influenced by various seas, whose history is told by sedimentary rocks from that period. The sediment layers deposited on top of one another in seawater are like geological book pages inscribed with lithified information on animals and plants that lived long ago. Rocks also contain hints of environmental conditions and climates in different periods.

The Secrets of Ancient Seas
exhibition in the Estonian Museum of Natural History

We invite you to dive for a time travel on the seabed in the territory of Estonia from over half a billion years ago to the present. We will acquaint you with digitally created marine creatures and their genuine fossils from the collections of the museum.

THE EDIACARAN

ESTONIA AT THE SOUTH POLE

The world of 600 million years ago differed significantly from today’s world. The single supercontinent Rodinia, from which no present-day land fragment had split yet, was situated around the South Pole. During the Ediacaran period, the palaeocontinent Baltica – the territories of present-day Eastern Europe and Scandinavia – broke apart from Rodinia, with the area of Estonia at its centre, and set out for its over 200-million-year-long independent journey from the South Pole towards the equator.

LIFE STARTS TO EVOLVE

In the Ediacaran period, the Earth gradually recovered and warmed after the Cryogenian ice age, one of the harshest in Earth’s geological history. Evolution of life was only just taking its first steps. During this period, a freshwater sea invaded the area of present-day Estonia from what is the east direction by today’s geography. This glacier-fed sea was cold and poor in life. It was inhabited by bacteria, green algae and acritarchs – unicellular algae still mysterious to science. Various wormlike creatures were crawling in the bottom mud and the ancestors of jellyfish may have been swimming in the water column.

All early life forms known from the Ediacaran were soft-bodied, that is, lacked both an inner skeleton and a protective outer skeleton.

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  Jellyfish. Ancient jellyfish-like cnidarians may have lived in the waters here because fossils of such creatures have been found in Northwest Russia.
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  Algae. Plantlike algae grew either attached to the seabed or floating freely in the water column.
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  †Planolites. The burrow-like fossils found from the rocks here may have been left by minute worms that once bustled in the bottom mud.
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  †Charnia. These plantlike animals were probably some of the earliest more complex multicellular creatures in Earth’s history.

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