Birds do it. Bees do it. And over 541 million years ago, weird organisms that looked like armored carpets did it. Exactly how they did so, though, was a bit different from the ways we’re familiar with.

University of Cambridge paleontologist Emily Mitchell and colleagues were the ones to reconstruct how these puzzling species reproduced. They focused on a species from the Ediacaran period called Fractofusus. The fossil is a strange, branching frond preserved as flat impressions in the ancient sediment, but it’s so unlike anything alive today that scientists are still unsure whether it was an animal, a plant, or what. Nevertheless, by studying the geographic pattern of how these fossils are preserved across the rocks of Newfoundland, Canada, Mitchell