Ediacaran
adj.— «Geologists have added a new period to their official calendar of Earth’s history—the first in 120 years. The Ediacaran Period covers some 50 million years of ancient time on our planet from 600 million years ago to about 542 million years ago. It officially becomes part of the Neoproterozoic, when multi-celled life forms started to take hold on Earth.» —“Geological time gets a new period” BBC (U.K.) May 17, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How do you transform ancient Chinese script for use in the modern age? English uses a keyboard with just 26 letters, but the first Chinese typewriter looked like a small table under a huge disk with more than 4,000 characters. A new book chronicles...
What’s up with ketchup? The shifting history and spelling of the name of this condiment. For centuries, ketchup was a fishy sauce originating in Asia—the tomatoes came only later! Plus, a new book shows what’s lost when a language dies: when there...