Ernietta is a bag-shaped erniettomorph

Erniettomorph

The Erniettomorphs are a form of Ediacaran fossil consisting of rows of airbed-like tubes arranged along a midline with a glide symmetry. Representative genera include Ernietta, Phyllozoon, Pteridinium, Swartpuntia and possibly Dickinsonia....

 genus

Genus

In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

 that lived half-buried in sediment, and probably fed by osmosis. It had chambered walls. It was from shale in the Dabis Formation in Namibia

Namibia

Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia , is a country in southern Africa whose western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and east. It gained independence from South Africa on 21 March...

 dated from 549 to 543 mya. The name has also been misspelled as Ernettia in some papers. Other names that have been given to fossils that are probably the same organism are: Erniaster, Erniobaris, Erniobeta, Erniocarpus, Erniocentris, Erniocoris, Erniodiscus, Erniofossa, Erniograndis, Ernionorma, Erniopelta and Erniotaxis.

Further reading

• Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (Princeton Science Library) by Andrew H. Knoll
• Exceptional Fossil Preservation by David J. Bottjer, Walter Etter, James W. Hagadorn, and Carol M. Tang
• The Ecology of the Cambrian Radiation by Andrey Zhuravlev and Robert Riding