Explore: Eozoon Canadense

Eozoön canadense (literally, "dawn animal of Canada") is a pseudofossil. John William Dawson described the banded structures of coarsely crystalline calcite

mm. Concretion with calcite-filled septarian cracks. Scale in mm. Eozoön canadense from the Precambrian of Canada, a metamorphic rock made of interlayered

rock made of interlayered calcite and serpentine from the Precambrian of Canada. Once thought to be a pseudofossil called Eozoön canadense. Scale in mm.

America in 1893. Sir William Dawson's name is especially associated with Eozoon canadense, which in 1865 he described as an organism having the structure of

adduced by Canadian geologists as to the organic nature of the so-called Eozoon canadense, discovered in the Laurentian strata, also called the North American

that system; he supported at first the view of the organic nature of Eozoon canadense (1866 and 1876), he devoted special attention to Foraminifera, and

different periods in Earth's history; in 1865 he would argue that Eozoon canadense represented the earliest form of life. Samuel Wilberforce had also

University of Tübingen awarded him a doctorate for his participation in the Eozoön canadense controversy. He was an active member of The New Church (Swedenborgian)

with an interest in botany. In 1872 he wrote supporting the case for Eozoon canadense being recognised as a fossil. From 1874, he was employed as the Medical