Ediacaran Animals

The Dawn of Animal Life. An excellent site on the Ediacaran/Vendian fauna, from Queen's University, in Ontario, Canada.
A special page devoted to Ediacaran fossils, from Queen's University
Feature article by Karen Wright for Discover, 1997.
Ediacaran reefs (formed by stromatolites) in the Ediacaran area near Adelaide, Australia.
Nice images of some of the oldest Ediacaran fossils, around 565 Ma, from Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, Canada.
More about Mistaken Point from the Canadian Geological Survey.
Yale's page from their Peabody Museum on the Mistaken Point fossils
Guy Narbonne's work on Ediacaran fossils (and more).
Some of Guy Narbonne's papers are archived in PDF here
Precambrian multicellular soft-bodied animals of the Vendian (= Ediacaran) Fauna) (600 to 540 My)
UC Berkeley's page on the Ediacaran fossils from Ediacara.
Animation of Continental Drift from 750 to 540 Mya
"Earliest chordate" claimed from the Ediacaran of Australia. News stories from October 25, 2003:
- story 1
- story 2
No reasonable person can say anything sensible on the basis of the text of these news reports. The quality of reporting is terrible. Gehling comes across as a complete idiot in the quotes he is alleged to have made, though he is a respected worker on Ediacaran fossils. But let's make a start. This specimen is NOT a vertebrate, it does NOT have a backbone, it is NOT 26 inches long, If it has a head, it's not a chordate but a craniate, so it probably doesn't have a head either. The way Gehling is alleged to have described it to reporters, it's clear he believes it's a chordate like Branchiostoma. Why he went on about backbones I can't imagine, because that set off a feeding frenzy among these scientifically illiterate reporters. And it's obvious that Gehling didn't make it clear that he was talking about Ediacarans, not vertebrates, that may be related to jellyfish, crustaceans etc. Where did whales come into it? And he probably said "head end" which they heard as "head". Jim Gehling is probably hunched over a Stubbie somewhere, wondering what went wrong. Next time, Jim, for heaven's sake give them a bit of paper with the real story written down for them, in little words and short sentences!!!
The immediate reaction among American Web pundits is that the new fossil is probably Kimberella, a bilaterian that may well be an early lophotrochozoan, not related to deuterostomes at all. I hope that Gehling gets out some details soon, with better images. Until he does, I'd guess also that it is a Kimberella.
Here is the new fossil.
Here is Kimberella Article from Science News 1997 about a new reconstruction of Kimberella

Rangeomorphs

BBC News OnLine. The paper was eventually published in Science . These are new Ediacaran fossils from Newfoundland, preserved in 3D. Guy Narbonne has presented a simple, elegant and convincing new synthesis of the frond-like animals, the rangeomorphs. They grew by adding units in different ways, so that one complete animal could take on many different shapes and sizes. As with Butterfield's work on Proterozoic protists (Chapter 3), this implies that Ediacaran animals were less diverse than has been supposed. There is a graceless and careless comment in Science from Martin Brasier's group in Oxford. They accept Narbonne's analysis without praising it, and say without discussion that it also applies to later Ediacaran animals that look like Dickinsonia. Then they go into a riff about the potential value of heterochrony to unravel the real truth about these modular Ediacarans. That won't work: here's why. Heterochrony is a powerful incantation to use (6 times in two pages!): the idea covers changes in growth. But "heterochrony" is a description of how change takes place: it does not begin to explain WHY that change takes place. Even if you'd like to have an explicit description of evolution, it's incredibly difficult to pin down which of the array of possible heterochronic changes actually took place in evolution, even in individual fossil creatures that lay down growth-lines to help us understand their growth (molluscs, or brachiopods). It's very much worse in modular creatures such as corals or bryozoans, which can vary the growth rates and growth forms of individuals, groups of individuals, and whole colonies from time to time and from locality to locality, even within the same biological species: and even the concept of biological species can be very difficult to pin down in modular organisms. See Budd, A. F., and J. M. Pandolfi. 2004. Paleobiology 30: 396425. So what Brasier and Antcliffe are doing is waving a magic word that won't unlock any of the secrets of Ediacarans. The future lies in studies such as Narbonne's, which lay a solid pragmatic structure based on analyses of real fossils.

Vendozoa

You might enjoy Ben Waggoner's review of McMenamin's book "The Garden of Ediacara", though I'm sure McMenamin did not.

Page last updated December 4, 2006.

Links last checked, October 1, 2005.

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