ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Complex embryos displaying bilaterian characters from Precambrian Doushantuo phosphate deposits, Weng'an, Guizhou, China.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Re-evaluating molecular clock maximum age calibrations revives pre-Ediacaran divergence estimates for animals.Science advances · 2026Article
- The vertebrate yolk sac: evolutionary origins and current advances in in vitro models.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2026Review
- Developmental biology ofProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Diverse and complex developmental mechanisms of early Ediacaran embryo-like fossils from the Weng'an Biota, southwest China.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Nucleus preservation in early Ediacaran Weng'an embryo-like fossils, experimental taphonomy of nuclei and implications for reading the eukaryote fossil record.Interface focus · 2020Article
- Critical appraisal of tubular putative eumetazoans from the Ediacaran Weng'an Doushantuo biota.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- Sponge grade body fossil with cellular resolution dating 60 Myr before the Cambrian.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Article
- Life cycle evolution: was the eumetazoan ancestor a holopelagic, planktotrophic gastraea?BMC evolutionary biology · 2013Review
- Evolution of centralized nervous systems: two schools of evolutionary thought.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2012Review
- Distinguishing geology from biology in the Ediacaran Doushantuo biota relaxes constraints on the timing of the origin of bilaterians.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2012Article
- Experimental taphonomy of giant sulphur bacteria: implications for the interpretation of the embryo-like Ediacaran Doushantuo fossils.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2012Article
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11 authors.
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Abstract
Three-dimensionally preserved embryos from the Precambrian Ediacaran Doushantuo Formation, Weng'an, Guizhou, southern China, have attracted great attention as the oldest fossil evidence yet found for multicellular animal life on Earth. Many embryos are early cleavage embryos and most of them yield a limited phylogenetic signal. Here we report the discovery of two Doushantuo embryos that are three-dimensionally preserved and complex. Imaging techniques using propagation phase-contrast based synchrotron radiation microtomography (PPC-SR-microCT) reveal that the organization of cells demonstrates several bilaterian features, including the formation of anterior-posterior, dorso-ventral, and right-left polarities, and cell differentiation. Unexpectedly, our observations show a noticeable difference in organization patterns between the embryos, suggesting that they represent two distinct taxa. These embryos provide further evidence for the presence of bilaterian animals in the Doushantuo biota. Furthermore, these bilaterians had already diverged into distantly related groups at least 40 million years before the Cambrian radiation, indicating that the last common ancestor of the bilaterians lived much earlier than is usually thought.
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