McIlroy, D. Were the First Trace Fossils Really Burrows or Could They Have Been Made by Sediment-Displacive Chemosymbiotic Organisms? Life2022, 12, 136.
McIlroy, D. Were the First Trace Fossils Really Burrows or Could They Have Been Made by Sediment-Displacive Chemosymbiotic Organisms? Life 2022, 12, 136.
McIlroy, D. Were the First Trace Fossils Really Burrows or Could They Have Been Made by Sediment-Displacive Chemosymbiotic Organisms? Life2022, 12, 136.
McIlroy, D. Were the First Trace Fossils Really Burrows or Could They Have Been Made by Sediment-Displacive Chemosymbiotic Organisms? Life 2022, 12, 136.
Abstract
This review asks some hard questions about what the enigmatic graphoglyptid trace fossils are, documents some of their early fossil record from the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition and explores the idea that they may not have been fossils at all. Most researchers have considered the Graphoglyptida to have had a microbial-farming mode of life similar to that proposed for the fractal Ediacaran Rangeomorpha. This begs the question “What are the Graphoglyptida if not the Rangeomorpha persevering” and if so then “What if…?”. This provocative idea has at its roots some fundamental questions about how to distinguish burrows sensu-stricto from the external molds of endobenthic sediment displacive organisms.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
