How 2 Teens Accidentally Solved Charles Darwin’s Most Vexing Problem : ScienceAlert

In 1956, a teenage girl by the name of Tina Negus was summering in the United Kingdom’s Charnwood Forest with her family, when she noticed a curious imprint on an overhanging rock face.

It looked like a fern. But as a budding geologist, Negus knew these 600 million year old rocks were too old to host such a plant. According to the established fossil record, the first complex species of flora wouldn’t appear for at least another sixty million years, following the event known as the Cambrian explosion.

Sometimes called the biological big bang, the ‘explosion’s’ abrupt burst in biodiversity…