Mattresses, the Universe and Everything: the fossils of the Ediacaran Biota

Life on Earth 600 million years ago comprised enigmatic mattress-like organisms, but some modern ecological rules did apply

In Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams has left Marvin the Paranoid Android stranded and walking in circles (literally) on Sqornshellous Zeta. This is a swampy planet, where the dominant life form is the mattress. Marvin chats with Zem, a perky and affable pocket-sprung mattress, who encourages him to be 'more mattressy*'. In an infinite universe, Adams tells us, very few things are manufactured, since everything has evolved somewhere, including mattresses. They are harvested and shipped out to be slept on across the galaxy.

Douglas Adams certainly liked to play around with ideas in evolution. The unlikely evolution of the babel fish was the cause of a theological existential crisis, and his bureaucratic and bad-tempered Vogons were effectively disowned by evolution as soon as they left the primordial seas of Vogsphere. What I don't know is whether Douglas Adams had ever read about the Ediacaran biota: fossils from a time when Earth was, briefly, the planet of the mattresses.