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Edited by Neil H. Shubin, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and approved December 9, 2014 (received for review April 15, 2014)
Significance
Patterns of evolution, origination, and extinction of early animal life on this planet are largely interpreted from fossils of the soft-bodied Ediacara Biota, Earth’s earliest multicellular communities preserved globally. The record of these organisms predates the well-known Cambrian Explosion by nearly 40 million years and provides critical information concerning early experimentation with complex life-forms on Earth. Here we show that, although in appearance, these organisms look very strange and unfamiliar, many of them may have had a biology and/or ecology similar to animals today, and some were most certainly bilaterians, cnidarians, and poriferans.
Abstract
Patterns of origination and evolution of early complex life on this planet are largely interpreted from the fossils of the Precambrian soft-bodied Ediacara Biota. These fossils occur globally and represent a diverse suite of organisms living in marine environments. Although these exceptionally preserved fossil assemblages are typically difficult to reconcile with modern phyla, examination of the morphology, ecology, and taphonomy of these taxa provides keys to their relationships with modern taxa. Within the more than 30 million y range of the Ediacara Biota, fossils of these multicellular organisms demonstrate the advent of mobility, heterotrophy by multicellular animals, skeletonization, sexual reproduction, and the assembly of complex ecosystems, all of which are attributes of modern animals. This approach to these fossils, without the constraint of attempting phylogenetic reconstructions, provides a mechanism for comparing these taxa with both living and extinct animals.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: Mary.Droser{at}UCR.EDU.
Author contributions: M.L.D. and J.G.G. designed research; M.L.D. and J.G.G. performed research; M.L.D. analyzed data; and M.L.D. and J.G.G. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1403669112/-/DCSupplemental.
The advent of animals: View from the Ediacaran
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Article Classifications
- Biological Sciences
- Evolution
- Physical Sciences
- Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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- Article
- Abstract
- The Temporal and Spatial Record
- Environments of the Ediacara Biota
- Heterogeneity of the Ediacaran Seafloor: An Example from the Ediacaran of South Australia
- Population Structure and Reproduction
- Skeletonization and a Link to the Cambrian
- Mobility and the Presence of Bilaterians
- Concluding Remarks
- Acknowledgments
- Footnotes
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