Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Scientists believe they’ve deduced why prehistoric Ediacara Biota fossils have remained preserved for millions of years. The fossils of these soft-bodied creatures from before the Cambrian Explosion have perplexed scientists for generations. While the uniquely shaped soft-bodied organisms should have been washed away, they have instead endured as part of the fossilized record. “The Ediacara Biota look totally bizarre in their appearance,” Lidya Tarhan, paleontologist at Yale University, said in a statement from the Geological Society of America. Before mining clues from the fossils, scientists needed to know how they even formed to begin with.