Food sources for the Ediacara biota communities
Abstract
The Ediacara biota represents the first complex macroscopic organisms in the geological record, foreshadowing the radiation of eumetazoan animals in the Cambrian explosion. However, little is known about the contingencies that lead to their emergence, including the possible roles of nutrient availability and the quality of food sources. Here we present information on primary producers in the Ediacaran based on biomarker molecules that were extracted from sediments hosting Ediacaran macrofossils. High relative abundances of algal steranes over bacterial hopanes suggest that the Ediacara biota inhabited nutrient replete environments with an abundance of algal food sources comparable to Phanerozoic ecosystems. Thus, organisms of the Ediacara biota inhabited nutrient-rich environments akin to those that later fuelled the Cambrian explosion.
Additional Information
© 2020 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 06 March 2019; Accepted 13 February 2020; Published 09 March 2020. We thank P. Rychkov, A. Ivantsov, A. Krasnova, E. Luzhnaya and A. Nagovitsyn for their help in the field, N.J. Butterfield for his helpful feedback on the manuscript. The study is funded by Australian Research Council grants DP160100607 and DP170100556 (to J.J.B.), Russian Foundation for Basic Research project no. 17-05-02212A (to I.B). I.B. gratefully acknowledges the Australian Government Research Training Program stipend scholarship. Data availability: All data required to understand and assess the conclusions of this research are available in the main text and supplementary materials. Rock samples, extracts and digital raw GC–MS data are stored at the Australian National University. Author Contributions: I.B. designed the study, analyzed biomarkers and interpreted the data; J.M.H. helped with biomarker analysis; I.B. and E.G. collected samples; I.B. and J.J.B. wrote the manuscript, with contributions from all authors. The authors declare no competing interests.Attached Files
Published - s41467-020-15063-9.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2020_15063_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2020_15063_MOESM2_ESM.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC7062841
- Eprint ID
- 101812
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200310-084031263
- Australian Research Council
- DP160100607
- Australian Research Council
- DP170100556
- Russian Foundation for Basic Research
- 17-05-02212A
- Australian Government
- Created
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2020-03-10Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field