Tiny fossils fill a missing chapter: how ocean life bounced back after Snowball Earth

After the Marinoan Snowball Earth glaciation ended around 635 million years ago, the oceans rebuilt. Qin Ye of China University of Geosciences in Wuhan and colleagues have now described fossils from Ancangping in Hubei's Yangtze Gorges area — 35 species of microscopic acritarchs, including three new species, preserved in the same rock layers as six forms of larger fossils, dated to roughly 620–610 million years ago. Micro- and macro-fossils are usually preserved separately, so finding both together, published in Communications Biology, fills a gap in how marine communities recovered from one of Earth's harshest ice ages.