If you like enigmatic blobs, then you would have loved the Ediacaran. Back then, between 575 and 541 million years ago, much of life came in a range of fronds, pancakes, and medallions that have puzzled and inspired paleontologists for decades. Some of them were animals. Others were forms of life that defy categorization. But even though mysteries still abound, paleontologist Imran Rahman and colleagues have solved one aspect of how a particular species of Ediacaran oddball fed and what that meant for the evolution of our seas.

Rahman and coauthors settled on a tiny button of an organism named Tribrachidium heralicum. This circular, triple-ridged species has been found in marine rocks in South Australia, Russie, and Ukraine dating