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The putative fossils were extracted from the 890-million-year-old Little Dal reefs of northwestern Canada, which are now exposed parts of the Mackenzie Mountains.

Elizabeth Turner, the study’s sole author and a geologist at Laurentian University, first discovered the fossils as a graduate student in the ’90s, when working in a remote part of the rugged Mackenzie Mountains that separate the Yukon and the Northwest Territory.

An outfitter then drove us and our rented canoes five hours north to a remote floatplane base; finally, we took a 90-minute flight to the Snake’s headwaters high in the Mackenzie Mountains.