A researcher from the University of Cambridge recently worked on the Bonavista Peninsula to get a better understanding of what’s left of some of the oldest organisms in the history of life on earth.

Paleontologist Emily Mitchell used portable 3D metrology equipment from FARO and Manchester Metrology Ltd. to map thousands of large, complex fossils—dating from about 560 million years ago—along the coastline in Little Catalina, Newfoundland, Canada.

Paleontologist Emily Mitchell

“They’re very complicated and they’re very large; they can be up to a meter long and they’re really, really weird-looking,” says Mitchell. “They don’t look like animals, and they don’t look like plants, and they don’t look like fungi or mushrooms and as a result it’s very hard to work out what they actually were.”

Mitchell and other researchers mapping fossils along the coastline in Little Catalina

 …