Over the last 20 years, Mary Droser and many students in the Droser Lab have been investigating the paleoecology and paleobiology of the Ediacara Biota. Twenty years ago, with colleague, Jim Gehling, UCR graduate students and South Australia Museum personnel we started working on what has become a critically important site in South Australia, Nilpena Station. There are about a half dozen reasonable Ediacara fossil sites globally, but excavation and reconstruction of square meters of fossilized seafloor is not something typically done with the deep time fossil record. At Nilpena this laborious process has provided access to an abundance of fossils within an ecological context, which has led to many great discoveries about the dawn of animal life.

The past two decades of research at Nilpena has focused on a diversity of questions pertaining to the Ediacaran fossil record. With a series of students, we have concentrated on the biology and ecology of discrete taxa in order to constrain possible phylogenetic affinities (Tarhan et al., 2015; Hall et al., 2015; Evans et al., 2015 and Sappenfield et al., 2016), uprooted the long time paradigm of preservation of these fossils by showing that it was due to high silica levels in the ocean (Tarhan et al., 2016), and demonstrated that major ecological and biological innovations actually happened in the Precambrian before the Cambrian radiation, which was long thought to be the first radiation of animals (Droser et al., 2015; Gehling et al., 2014). Current research being done by the Droser Lab at Nilpena is focused on a number of deep dives into specific taxa, community level dynamics and the role of organic mats in the biology and ecology of these Ediacaran organisms and the subsequent sedimentology.

Just as exciting, Nilpena is now a National Park and the SA government is working towards a World Heritage bid for the Flinders Ranges area that will include Nilpena.