Charnia masoni is and has been the most important and studied Ediacaran fossil as its presence has shown that the rocky layers that contained it were older than 542 million years. Charnia, like other rangeomorphs, has alternate and "wrapped" empire branches arranged along a frond that rose in the water column with a very short stem at the base. Sometimes, in some fossils a disk is also found that acted as an anchoring system called holdfast. The organism had considerable variation in morphology within populations; The Charnia is known both for small specimens just three centimeters (Liu et al., 2012), and up to larger specimens that exceeded 60 cm in length (Ford, 1999).