Mawsonites

Mawsonites is a genus of Ediacaran fossils from the Ediacara Hills of South Australia, dated to roughly 635 to 539 million years ago. Its type species, Mawsonites spriggi, was named in 1966 for South Australian geologists Douglas Mawson and Reg Sprigg and shows a dome shaped body that becomes steeply conical near a raised central cone, with large irregular lobes separated by deep clefts radiating outward. The organism's true nature is unresolved: it has been proposed as algal holdfasts, a jellyfish, a filter feeder, a burrow, a microbial colony or invertebrate tracks, and while some researchers wondered if it was merely a sedimentary structure such as a mud volcano, later study found that explanation could not account for its complexity.