For the past two decades Californian palaeontologist Mary Droser has been travelling to Nilpena in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges every year and sleeping in shearers’ quarters to carry on the ground-breaking work she and her team are doing unearthing some of the most important fossils on the planet.

The so-called Ediacara biota represents, in her words, “the dawn of animal life on Earth” – the first life that moved and the first that sexually reproduced. Discovered by Australian palaeontologist Reg Sprigg in the 1940s, the fossil-rich sandstone beds of Nilpena’s Ediacara Hills (hence the fossils’ name), distinguish the region as the world’s most accessible and rich source of these 500 million-year-old fossils.