What are Some Ediacaran Organisms?

The Ediacaran fauna is located in the Ediacaran region of southern Australia. It is a multicellular multi-vertebrate invertebrate that lived in a large group of molluscs of the Precambrian period 565-543 million years ago. It includes 31 species of lower invertebrates of 22 families, 8 families, coelenterta, arthropoda and phyla. The 22nd International Geological Conference held in 1960 officially named the fossil group "Edikala Fauna". The discovery of the Ediacaran fauna has initially solved the mystery of the so-called "evolutionary explosion" in which a large number of invertebrate fossils suddenly appeared in the early Cambrian. The more unearthed Ediacaran fossils, the more irregular they are. There are many arguments about what these fossils are and when.

For nearly 3 billion years after the emergence of living things on the earth, they have been living in the ocean as single cells. About 680 million years ago, a large number of large and complex multicellular organisms suddenly appeared in the ocean. The most famous early multicellular fauna is the Ediacaran fauna that lived between 580 million and 560 million years ago. The Ediacaran fauna holds large, multicellular fossils. Paleontologists peeled off thin brown mudstones and found many animal impression fossils. It is amazing that most of the animals in the Ediacaran fauna do not have hardware, such as jellyfish, worms, coral-like animals, etc. ^[1]

The Ediacara biome contains three

The Ediacaran fauna is soft-skinned, and most of them are flat and symmetrical, with many types. Many are jellyfish-shaped discs, such as Medusinites, Tribrachidium, Spinther, with curved curved grooves on the surface, or with concentric ridges, or both. They can be called jellyfishes, all of which have become extinct. representative. Some are leaf-like or band-like, similar to modern sea pens, such as fern leaf-shaped Langea and charnia, which are called Petalonamae. There are segmented hairy worms, such as Spriggina and Dickinsonia; some strangely seem to have 3 legs in the center; some have head covers and links. There are also early representatives of the Echinoderm astral genus that became extinct in the Early Carboniferous. ^[2]

In 1946, in the Flinders Mountains of Australia, geologist RegC. Sprigg discovered the Ediacara fossils in the late Proterozoic period. This is a major discovery and is protected worldwide. The Ediacaran fauna, which flourished from 700 to 580 million years ago, is widely distributed throughout the world, including Australia (Ediacar and Flinders Mountains), Russia (Alensk, northeast of Moscow, northern Siberia "Germania" exposed area), Ukraine (Podolia in the southwest), Baltic Sweden (Tone Lake District in the north) United Kingdom (Chamwood forest, Leicestershire, discovered in 1840), Newfoundland (Discovered in 1872), South Africa, Namibia, North America (Fedonkin, 1992), and China s Hubei Gorge East (Ding Qixiu, Chen Yiyuan, 1981), Eastern Liaoning Peninsula, Eastern Heilongjiang and other places. Under the Cretaceous crustacean fauna, it is common in the late Proterozoic ice deposits. Because the accuracy of the age determination in the late Proterozoic is not ideal, the appearance and differentiation of this fauna is Gradually or rapidly, opinions differ, but their differentiation is generally considered to be rapid but not instantaneous (Stanley, 1976). The Ediacaran fauna evolved shortly after its appearance, similar to exponential differentiation ^[2]

The Ediacaran biota was developed by Sprigg in the Ediacara region of south-central Australia in 1947.

The composition of the Ediacaran biota shows that it lives in

There are several fossils that are more like pioneers of later animals. In the late Ediacara, some bugs crawled

So far, life on earth has lasted 3.5 billion years, but nearly 3 billion of these are the era of aquatic bacteria and algae. Although life is constantly self-improving, in the billions of years, eukaryotes have emerged and the trend of multicellular individuals has emerged, life in this period is still very primitive. This situation changed at the end of the algae era. In 1947, paleontologists

The strangely immobile organism consisting of "tubes" is the earliest complex life on earth. They appeared 577 million years ago, flourished on the ocean floor for about 37 million years, and then disappeared. This turned into a miracle, one can only know the fur from the vague marks of the sandstone fossil record.

What makes them extinct? New fossil evidence from Namibia shows that the world of these Ediacaran fauna was disrupted by an outbreak of life forms at the beginning of the Cambrian 541 million years ago. Some of these creatures may have evolved to eat their mysterious ancestors, and transformed the environment by leaving little hope for the passive Ediacaran fauna.

If that's the case, the first mass extinction of these complex life forms would have biological causes, rather than five mass extinctions of species thought to be driven by the environment.

The disappearance of the Ediacaran fauna from the fossil record has troubled biologists. The mainstream theory is that during a catastrophic extinction, they were eaten or their habitat was destroyed by newly evolved animals, or because of changes in the marine environment, no more fossil records were left.

After careful study, Marc Laflamme and colleagues from the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus did not find hypoxic conditions or other perturbed geochemical features to support the environmentally driven view of the mass extinction. Considering that the fossils of this Cambrian mollusk were formed in rocks like the famous Porkys Shale, the external environment seems unlikely to allow any surviving Ediacaran fauna to remain during the Cambrian Fossil imprint.

Edikala fauna