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Article
Ichnological evidence for meiofaunal bilaterians from the terminal Ediacaran and earliest Cambrian of Brazil
The evolutionary events during the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition (~541 Myr ago) are unparalleled in Earth history. The fossil record suggests that most extant animal phyla appeared in a geologically brief inte...
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Article
Open AccessEnhanced cellular preservation by clay minerals in 1 billion-year-old lakes
Organic-walled microfossils provide the best insights into the composition and evolution of the biosphere through the first 80 percent of Earth history. The mechanism of microfossil preservation affects the qu...
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Article
Microfossils of sulphur-metabolizing cells in 3.4-billion-year-old rocks of Western Australia
Geochemical evidence suggests that sulphur-metabolizing bacteria were present at least 3.5 billion years ago. Geochemical and petrological analyses of microstructures from 3.4-billion-year-old rocks in Western...
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Article
Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes
Fossil discoveries in billion-year-old Precambrian shales from the Torridonian of the northwest Scottish Highlands suggest that the eukaryotes that evolved to live on the land emerged from the sea earlier than...
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Chapter
Towards a Null Hypothesis for Stromatolites
“How on Earth did life begin?” is one of the noblest questions we can ask in science, but it took well over a century from Darwin (1859) to gain an understanding of life in the Precambrian. Why did an understa...
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Chapter
Taphonomy in Temporally Unique Settings: An Environmental Traverse in Search of the Earliest Life on Earth
There is an apparent preservational paradox in the early rock record. Cellularly preserved and ensheathed microfossils which are remarkably preserved from the late Archaean (c.2700 Ma) onward, have rarely been fo...
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Chapter
Evolutionary Trends in Remarkable Fossil Preservation Across the Ediacaran–Cambrian Transition and the Impact of Metazoan Mixing
A unifying model is presented that explains most of the major changes seen in fossil preservation and redox conditions across the Precambrian–Cambrian transition. It is proposed that the quality of cellular an...
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Chapter
Fossils with Little Relief: Using Lasers to Conserve, Image, and Analyze the Ediacara Biota
Fifty years have now passed since the discovery of Charnia masoni and Charniodiscus concentricus in Charnwood Forest, UK. But what is Charnia? And how was it related to the great explosion of animal fossils at th...
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Chapter
Osmotrophic Biofilms: From Modern to Ancient
We here explore the potential of nonphotosynthetic microbes as significant players in the formation and preservation of structures such as microbial mats and soil-like networks. In particular, we focus on orga...
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Chapter
Looking Through Windows onto the Earliest History of Life on Earth and Mars
We know that planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old but what is less clear is when it first became home to life. Locating the first evidence for life on Earth is a question of considerable complexity and ...
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Chapter
The Evolution of Life on Earth and in the Universe
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Article
Questioning the evidence for Earth's oldest fossils
Structures resembling remarkably preserved bacterial and cyanobacterial microfossils from ∼3,465-million-year-old Apex cherts of the Warrawoona Group in Western Australia1,2,3,4 currently provide the oldest morph...
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Chapter
The Basal Cambrian Transition and Cambrian Bio-Events (From Terminal Proterozoic Extinctions to Cambrian Biomeres)
Within the Cambrian about six globally traceable extinction events are recognised, of which those across the Mid Botomian through to Toyonian/Amgan are of highest order. All events are associated with facies c...
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Article
Turtle drift
