Late Ediacaran redox stability and metazoan evolution
By D. Johnston, S. Poulton, T. Goldberg, V. Sergeev, V. Podkovyrov, N. G. Vorob’eva, A. Bekker, Andrew H. Knoll. 2012
147 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Neoproterozoic arrival of animals fundamentally changed Earth’s biological and geochemical trajectory. Since the early description of Ediacaran and Cambrian animal fossils, a vigorous debate has emerged about the drivers underpinning their seemingly rapid radiation. Some argue for predation and ecology as central to diversification, whereas others point to a changing chemical environment as the trigger. In both cases, questions of timing and feedbacks remain unresolved. Through these debates, the last fifty years of work has largely converged on the concept that a change in atmospheric oxygen levels, perhaps manifested indirectly as an oxygenation of the deep ocean, was causally linked to the initial diversification of large animals. What has largely been absent, but is provided in this study, is a multi-proxy stratigraphic test of this hypothesis. Here, we describe a coupled geochemical and paleontological investigation of Neoproterozoic sedimentary rocks from northern Russia. In detail, we provide iron speciation data, carbon and sulfur isotope compositions, and major element abundances from a predominantly siliciclastic succession (spanning4 1000 m) sampled by the Kel’tminskaya-1 drillcore. Our interpretation of these data is consistent with the hypothesis that the pO 2 threshold required for diversification of animals with high metabolic oxygen demands was crossed prior to or during the Ediacaran Period. Redox stabilization of shallow marine environments was, however, also critical and only occurred about 560 million years ago (Ma), when large motile bilaterians first enter the regional stratigraphic record. In contrast, neither fossils nor geochemistry lend support to the hypothesis that ecological interactions altered the course of evolution in the absence of environmental change. Together, the geochemical and paleontological records suggest a coordinated transition from low oxygen oceans sometime before the Marinoan ( � 635 Ma) ice age, through better oxygenated but still redox-unstable shelves of the early Ediacaran Period, to the fully and persistently oxygenated marine environments characteristic of later Ediacaran successions that preserve the first bilaterian macrofossils and trace fossils.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Geochemistry and Petrology, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/218f10e6714b6b1a1ae24d68d95653d68cb11d9c
Citations in the corpus
- Statistical analysis of iron geochemical data suggests limited late Proterozoic oxygenation (2015, unknown): “, 2012, Earth and Planetary Science Letters (44) Core 19”
- Remarkable insights into the paleoecology of the Avalonian Ediacaran macrobiota (2015, unknown): “Data from Russian shallow-marine sediments suggest the ferruginous to oxic shift occurred in the late Cryogenian (Johnston et al., 2012).”
- Micropaleontology of the lower Mesoproterozoic Roper Group, Australia, and implications for early eukaryotic evolution (2016, unknown): “…with sexual fusion) is induced by conditions that inhibit growth, including desiccation, nutrient deprivation, and anoxia, and so one might expect a resting stage to occur in the life cycles of eukaryotes in oceans with anoxic water masses beneath a thin oxic mixed layer (Johnston et al., 2012).”