Latest Ediacara biota Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Mysterious multicellular fossils believed to be ancient sea creatures may actually be some of the earliest land-dwelling organisms, according to a paper published online on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The controversial hypothesis has been fiercely criticized, with some paleontologists flatly rejecting the idea, but if true, the finding would push back life's transition from sea to land by as much as 100 million years or more....

The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought.The tracks -- two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter -- date back some 570 million years, to the Ediacaran period.The Ediacaran preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved.Scientists once thought that it was primarily microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to...

By Dong, Lin Xiao, Shuhai; Shen, Bing; Zhou, Chuanming Abstract: Horodyskia is one of the earliest known macroscopic life forms, with a fossil record dating from c. 1.4 Ga. Palaeopascichnus represents a key Ediacaran element with world-wide distribution. However, their body constructions and affinities are poorly understood, partly because previously described species are mostly preserved as casts and moulds in siliciclastic rocks. Silicified specimens from the upper Ediacaran Liuchapo...

By Hofmann, H J O'Brien, S J; King, A F ABSTRACT- Newly found fossils in the Conception and St. John's groups of the Bonavista Peninsula considerably extend the known geographic distribution of the Ediacaran fossils in Newfoundland. They occur in deepwater sediments and are preserved as epireliefs, forming census populations underneath volcanic ash layers throughout a more than 1 km thick turbiditic sequence. The exposed fossiliferous units comprise the Mistaken Point, Trepassey, Fermeuse,...

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Scientists have known for some time that most major groups of complex animals appeared in the fossils record during the Cambrian Explosion, a seemingly rapid evolutionary event that occurred 542 million years ago. Now Virginia Tech paleontologists, using rigorous analytical methods, have identified another explosive evolutionary event that occurred about 33 million years earlier among macroscopic life forms unrelated to the Cambrian animals.They dubbed this earlier event...

By Shen, Bing Xiao, Shuhai; Dong, Lin; Zhou, Chuanming; Liu, Jianbo ABSTRACT- Upper Neoproterozoic successions in the North China and nearby Chaidam blocks are poorly documented. North China successions typically consist of a diamictite unit overlain by siltstone, sandstone, or slate. Similar successions occur in Chaidam, although a cap carbonate lies atop the diamictite unit. The diamictites in both blocks have been variously interpreted as Cryogenian, Ediacaran, or Cambrian glacial...

Blacksburg, Va. July 11, 2005 "“ Scientists interested in ancient life have a wealth of fossils and impressions frozen in rocks that they can study from as far back as 540 million years ago "“ when animals with shells and bones began to become plentiful. But evidence of complex life older than 540 million years is scant and difficult to study. Now, a research team from Virginia Tech in the United States and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China has discovered uniquely...