Dispatch: a block that fell from an Arctic Norway cliff held a 560-million-year-old Charnia, Scandinavia's first, still in 3D.

Dispatch, we have a fossil that waited more than half a billion years for somebody to walk by. Earth.com reports that geologists surveying the Varanger Peninsula in far northern Norway found a Charnia, a branching, frond-shaped animal anchored to the seafloor in the Ediacaran period, just before the Cambrian explosion. "The block containing the fossil had fallen from the cliff sometime before and split open, and the fossil was just lying there in the grass, waiting to be found," Yorick Veenma of the University of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences told Earth.com. No Charnia had ever been reported from Scandinavia before. The frond is small, about 2.75 inches long and 0.8 inches across, but it rises about a fifth of an inch off the rock, roughly three pennies stacked. Most of these fossils are flat. This one kept its shape because an underwater avalanche of sediment swept it up and buried it fast, and clay in that sediment kept the soft body from being scoured apart. Seen in three dimensions, each branch narrows to an angular edge called a keel; seven of the ten main branches clear enough to examine have one. Those ridges may have been there all along, pressed out of earlier finds, though Veenma says it isn't yet clear how common they were. "It is a good example of how some details only become visible under a different style of preservation," he said. The study was published in the journal Palaeontology, and the collected material is now at the Arctic University Museum of Norway in Tromsø. Settling the question will take a second frond buried the same way, and as Earth.com puts it, "there is no telling which cliff it will fall out of." Over.