Fractal creatures filtered the Precambrian oceans
We knew it was not Rangeomorfos plant or marine fungi, but many animals belonging to the phylum Petalonamae. For about 40 million years ago during the Ediacaran, dominated the oceans of the world, living attached to a substrate at different depths. Before they occur, life was microscopic.
However, we did not take into account the mode of nutrition. Since fossil specimens, researchers have managed to recreate the 3D morphology of 11 taxa and measure their functional properties.
Three main, vertical and horizontal types, have been highlighted: tall, thin as other side, spruce flourished, such as deciduous trees, and a shape resembling a sponge deployed on the seabed. These organizational plans fractals, which are unlike any other known to reinforce the idea that they have their clade, ie, his own group comprising the ancestors and all descendants.
For scientists, the anatomy of these animals maximizes pluribranche body surface and is consistent with the osmotrophie, fashion power supply filter, from dissolved in seawater substances.
These filters optimize in an almost perfect anatomical area
"Speaking geometrically, are well organized to do it, capable of creating the greatest possible surface area for absorption in any space they occupied," says Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill, University of Cambridge, UK, lead author of the paper published in the Proceedings of magazines National Academy of Sciences.
This result is consistent with the ecological conditions of the time: the competitors and predators were absent and the marine environment rich in microscopic nutrients. "Ediacaran Oceans more like a thick soup, full of nutrients such as organic carbon, whereas today, the food particles in suspension was rapidly collected by a myriad of animals," says study co-author Simon Conway Morris, paleontologist at the University of Cambridge.
With the explosion of multicellular life in the Cambrian era, Rangéomorphes died there about 540 million years. The alleged causes are competing for nutrients with other agencies, predation and depletion of the specific resources they needed.
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