Whoopsies! Fossil From The Dawn Of Life Actually Just Bees - Defector

The impressions were too high on the cave wall to directly sample, so the geologists photographed the spot and analyzed it in 3D back in the lab, according to a story in The New York Times.

Gregory Retallack, a paleontologist at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues identified the impressions as the fossilized remains of Dickinsonia —a creature that looks like a thumbprint—and published their findings in the journal Gondwana Research.

Dickinsonia is frequently called one of the most iconic and controversial members of the Ediacaran biota—the creatures that occupied Earth starting around 635 million years ago.

Specifically, it is the decaying remains of a giant honeybee hive—according to a new paper in Gondwana Research titled "Stinging News: ‘Dickinsonia’ discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India not worth the buzz."

So he returned to the site with Samuel Kwafo and Ananya Singh, graduate students in his lab, as well as Manoj Pandit, a colleague at the University of Rajasthan in India.

But I see this misidentification as a testament to bees, creatures that leave such extravagant and orderly traces that they can fool a group of scientists into rewriting the history of a subcontinent.