When you go far back into the fossil record, things get weird! Long before mammoths, dinosaurs, and trilobites, lived the Ediacara biota: a group of early soft bodied macroscopic organisms. At Nilpena Ediacara National Park, South Australia thousands of individual Ediacaran fossils are preserved exactly where they lived allowing paleontologist to study these organisms while also considering their ecology.

Phillip C. Boan is a second year PhD student at the University of California, Riverside studying the spatial distribution Ediacaran fossils at Nilpena Ediacara National Park, South Australia. He received a Bachelor's of Science from the University of South Carolina and a Master's of Science from the University of California, Riverside. Before starting graduate school, Phillip worked for the South Carolina Geological Survey were he did digital cartography and spatial analysis.

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