Half a billion years before the first written word, creatures without mouths were already moving with purpose across the ocean floor—and new fossils from Canada's Mackenzie Mountains are pushing that story back even further. Paleontologists have uncovered more than a hundred specimens from the Ediacaran period, some 567 million years old, revealing that movement, feeding, and even sexual reproduction emerged in animal life far earlier than science had supposed. Found not in the shallow coastal waters where such discoveries are typically made, but along what was once a deep continental slope, t