Ediacaran biota | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-12-27

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota


00:04:05 1 History
00:07:57 2 Preservation
00:08:06 2.1 Microbial mats
00:09:26 2.2 Fossilization
00:11:06 2.3 Scale of preservation
00:12:13 3 Morphology
00:19:56 4 Classification and interpretation
00:21:07 4.1 Cnidarians
00:22:27 4.2 Protozoans
00:23:14 4.3 New phylum
00:24:16 4.4 Lichen hypothesis
00:25:36 4.5 Other interpretations
00:26:26 5 Origin
00:31:11 5.1 Preservation bias
00:32:04 5.2 Predation and grazing
00:33:20 5.3 Competition
00:33:58 5.4 Change in environmental conditions
00:34:43 6 Assemblages
00:35:18 6.1 Avalon-type assemblage
00:37:24 6.2 Ediacara-type assemblage
00:38:01 6.3 Nama-type assemblage
00:39:05 6.4 Significance of assemblages
00:41:06 7 See also



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SUMMARY
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The Ediacaran (; formerly Vendian) biota consisted of enigmatic tubular and frond-shaped, mostly sessile organisms that lived during the Ediacaran Period (ca. 635–542 Mya). Trace fossils of these organisms have been found worldwide, and represent the earliest known complex multicellular organisms. The Ediacaran biota may have radiated in a proposed event called the Avalon explosion, 575 million years ago, after the Earth had thawed from the Cryogenian period's extensive glaciation. The biota largely disappeared with the rapid increase in biodiversity known as the Cambrian explosion. Most of the currently existing body plans of animals first appeared in the fossil record of the Cambrian rather than the Ediacaran. For macroorganisms, the Cambrian biota appears to have completely replaced the organisms that dominated the Ediacaran fossil record, although relationships are still a matter of debate.
The organisms of the Ediacaran Period first appeared around 600 million years ago and flourished until the cusp of the Cambrian 542 million years ago, when the characteristic communities of fossils vanished. A diverse Ediacaran community was discovered in 1995 in Sonora, Mexico, and is approximately 555 million years in age, roughly coeval with Ediacaran fossils of the Ediacara Hills, South Australia and the White Sea, Russia. While rare fossils that may represent survivors have been found as late as the Middle Cambrian (510 to 500 million years ago), the earlier fossil communities disappear from the record at the end of the Ediacaran leaving only curious fragments of once-thriving ecosystems. Multiple hypotheses exist to explain the disappearance of this biota, including preservation bias, a changing environment, the advent of predators and competition from other life-forms.
Determining where Ediacaran organisms fit in the tree of life has proven challenging; it is not even established that they were animals, with suggestions that they were lichens (fungus-alga symbionts), algae, protists known as foraminifera, fungi or microbial colonies, or hypothetical intermediates between plants and animals. The morphology and habit of some taxa (e.g. Funisia dorothea) suggest relationships to Porifera or Cnidaria. Kimberella may show a similarity to molluscs, and other organisms have been thought to possess bilateral symmetry, although this is controversial. Most macroscopic fossils are morphologically distinct from later life-forms: they resemble discs, tubes, mud-filled bags or quilted mattresses. Due to the difficulty of deducing evolutionary relationships among these organisms, some palaeontologists have suggested that these represent completely extinct lineages that do not resemble any living organism. One palaeontologist proposed a separate kingdom level category Vendozoa (now renamed Vendobionta) in the Linnaean hierarchy for the Ediacaran biota. If these enigmatic organisms left no descendants, their strange forms might be seen as  a "failed experiment" in multicellular life, with later multicellular life ev ...