Joel Kontinen
The Ediacaran fossils are unique, was grew in a more complex way than we assumed.
They seem to defy Darwinian expectations.
The fossils date back more than half a billion years , to the late Ediacaran period. That makes them about 30 million years older than the next-oldest fossilized guts on record. More important than their age, though, is that these fossilized guts could finally pinpoint the identity of one of the most widespread types of animals before the Cambrian explosion, the rapids rapid diversification of life that occurred soon after the end of the Ediacaran. , because it exists right in between the weirdos of the Ediacaran.
We don't know what they are; they're bag-like animals that were maybe not animals, maybe just complex eukaryotes — they exist between those and what we know from the Cambrian, which we can recognize as animal life," said James Schiffbauer, a paleobiologist at the University of Missouri who led the new research. d diversification of life that occurred soon after the end of the Ediacaran.
They date to between 550 million and 539 million years ago. This was the end of the Ediacaran, the period in which the earliest multicellular complex life arose. Life at that time was bizarre and hard to classify by modern standards; most fossils of these organisms look like fronds, tubes or vaguely round bags.
Among the most common fossils from the late Ediacaran are a group called cloudinomorphs. Their fossils are found worldwide, Schiffbauer told Live Science, and they look like little tubes.
The findings appear yesterday (January 10) in the Journal Nature Communications.
Source:
Pappas, Stephanie 2020. Oldest Guts Ever Found May Reveal the Identity of a Mysterious Primordial Creature Live Science (10.1.).
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