Ediacaran biozones identified with network analysis provide evidence for pulsed extinctions of early complex life

Muscente, A.D.; Bykova, Natalia; Boag, Thomas H.; Buatois, Luís A.; Mángano, M. Gabriela; Eleish, Ahmed; Prabhu, Anirudh; Pan, Feifei; Meyer, M.; Schiffbauer, James D.; Fox, Peter; Hazen, Robert M.; Knoll, Andrew H.

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08837-3

Cited by 84 publications

(122 citation statements)

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“…Among the most significant are the emergences of biomineralization 2 and active motility 3 , which demarcate this interval from the rest of the Ediacaran Period. Toward the Period's conclusion, the first metazoan mass extinction event 4,5 encompassed the downfall of the archetypal Ediacaran biota. Their demise, however, was coincident with an ecological shift in which organisms such as Cloudina and other occupants of this novel tube-building morphotype 4 become increasingly populous.…”

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Discovery of bilaterian-type through-guts in cloudinomorphs from the terminal Ediacaran Period

et al. 2020

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The fossil record of the terminal Ediacaran Period is typified by the iconic index fossil Cloudina and its relatives. These tube-dwellers are presumed to be primitive metazoans, but resolving their phylogenetic identity has remained a point of contention. The root of the problem is a lack of diagnostic features; that is, phylogenetic interpretations have largely centered on the only available source of information-their external tubes. Here, using tomographic analyses of fossils from the Wood Canyon Formation (Nevada, USA), we report evidence of recognizable soft tissues within their external tubes. Although alternative interpretations are plausible, these internal cylindrical structures may be most appropriately interpreted as digestive tracts, which would be, to date, the earliest-known occurrence of such features in the fossil record. If this interpretation is correct, their nature as one-way through-guts not only provides evidence for establishing these fossils as definitive bilaterians but also has implications for the long-debated phylogenetic position of the broader cloudinomorphs.

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Discovery of bilaterian-type through-guts in cloudinomorphs from the terminal Ediacaran Period

et al. 2020

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“…In the unipartite networks ( Fig. 3a,b), each node is a sample; a link indicates that two samples share one or more taxa; and the links are weighted equal to the Bray-Curtis similarity scores of the connected samples 20 . The bipartite networks ( Fig.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3c,d), in contrast, contain both sample and taxon nodes where samples are connected by non-weighted links to their taxa, and vice versa, but no two samples (or two taxa) are directly connected to each other 19 . We partitioned these networks into modules (clusters of nodes) using 'community detection algorithms' [19][20][21][22] , which seek to identify the most densely connected nodes separated by the regions with fewest links. The unipartite network was partitioned into non-overlapping modules using weighted random walks, so the results reflect relative abundances of taxa.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The unipartite network was partitioned into non-overlapping modules using weighted random walks, so the results reflect relative abundances of taxa. Conversely, the bipartite network was partitioned into overlapping modules using a non-weighted modularity-based algorithm focused on the presence/absence of taxa 20 . The graphs of these networks illustrate that, although the Cretaceous and Paleogene samples differ with regard to both species and genera, the various time bins of the Paleogene are, by and large, only distinguishable at the species-level.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals

Foster

Garvie

Weiss

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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The hyperthermal events of the Cenozoic, including the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, provide an opportunity to investigate the potential effects of climate warming on marine ecosystems. Here, we examine the shallow benthic marine communities preserved in the late Cretaceous to Eocene strata on the Gulf coastal plain (United States). in stark contrast to the ecological shifts following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, our data show that the early Cenozoic hyperthermals did not have a long-term impact on the generic diversity nor composition of the Gulf Coastal Plain molluscan communities. We propose that these communities were resilient to climate change because molluscs are better adapted to high temperatures than other taxa, as demonstrated by their physiology and evolutionary history. In terms of resilience, these communities differ from other shallow-water carbonate ecosystems, such as reef communities, which record significant changes during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals. These data highlight the strikingly different responses of community types, i.e., the almost imperceptible response of molluscs versus the marked turnover of foraminifera and reef faunas. the impact on molluscan communities may have been low because detrimental conditions did not devastate the entire Gulf Coastal Plain, allowing molluscs to rapidly recolonise vacated areas once harsh environmental conditions ameliorated.Human activities are drastically changing conditions in coastal marine ecosystems by polluting, destroying habitats, overexploiting resources, enabling invasive species, and driving climate warming. Increased greenhouse gas emissions associated with these activities harm marine communities by expanding hypoxic dead zones, increasing ocean acidity, and causing thermal stress 1,2 . In order to understand how communities will respond to climate-related stressors, we look to potential deep-time analogues and the community shifts recorded by fossils. The Eocene witnessed two separate long-term warming trends of ~6 °C culminating in the late Ypresian and Bartonian, known as the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO) and the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO), respectively (Fig. S1). Superimposed on these long-term trends are many short-lived intervals of increased carbon injection into the atmosphere and increased sea surface temperatures, known as hyperthermals, and of these the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) and the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 have the highest magnitude and pace 3 (Fig. S1). It has been argued that these hyperthermal events represent the best analogues for projected climatic change, as they were caused by rapid increases in pCO 2 and involved various environmental consequences, such as ocean acidification and intensification of the hydrological cycle 2,4 . In addition, the peak of the MECO saw rapid warming 5 and could be considered another hyperthermal. Similar hyperthermal events of smaller magnitude have also been recorded from the Paleocene, e.g., the latest Danian Event 6 .The PETM was the m...

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“…Palaeontology and stratigraphy has become a quantitative study as a branch discipline of geoscience and there has been a subsequent rapid increase in the implementation of numerical methods in palaeontology (Hammer and Harper, 2006) and stratigraphy (Kemple et al, 1995;Rong et al, 2007;Huang et al, 2012;Fan et al, 2013b). Quantitative analysis based on big data of fossil and stratum records have been more common recently, especially on biodiversity evolution (Alroy et al, 2008;25 Hautmann, 2016), graphic correlation of strata (Fan et al, 2013b), palaeoecology (Muscente et al, 2018) and mass extinction (Muscente et al, 2019). Professional databases, such as Paleobiology Database (PBDB), Macrostrat (https://macrostrat.org/) and Geobiodiversity Database (GBDB) (Fan et al, 2013a), store and provide big data and make these high-impact studies possible.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retrospect and prospect of a section-based stratigraphic and palaeontological database – Geobiodiversity Database

Niu

Chen

2020

Preprint

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Abstract. Big data are significant to the quantitative analysis and contribute to the data-driven scientific research and discoveries. Here the thorough introduction is given on the Geobiodiversity database (GBDB), a comprehensive stratigraphic and palaeontological database. The GBDB includes abundant geological records from China and contributes a serial of scientific studies on early Palaeozoic palaeogeography, tectonic and biodiversity evolution of China. Nevertheless, the existing problems of the GBDB limited the using of its data. The turnover and improvement of the GBDB were started in 2019. Besides the data collecting, processing and visualization as the GBDB did previously, the database and the website are optimized and re-designed, the new GBDB working team pays more attention to data analyzing with the professional artificial intelligence techniques. GBDB is complementary to other related databases and further collaborations are proposed to mutually benefit and push forward the quantitative research of palaeontology and stratigraphy in the era of big data. The persistent snapshot of the GBDB data can be found at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3667645 (Xu, 2020).

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Ediacaran biozones identified with network analysis provide evidence for pulsed extinctions of early complex life

Cited by 84 publications

References 63 publications

Discovery of bilaterian-type through-guts in cloudinomorphs from the terminal Ediacaran Period

Discovery of bilaterian-type through-guts in cloudinomorphs from the terminal Ediacaran Period

Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals

Retrospect and prospect of a section-based stratigraphic and palaeontological database – Geobiodiversity Database

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