ArticleNature2017
The rise of algae in Cryogenian oceans and the emergence of animals.
Article in Nature, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 113 papers.
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Who cites it
113 citing papers in PubMed, 552 citations in OpenAlex.
- Experimental snowball earth viscosity drives the evolution of motile multicellularity.iScience · 2026Article
- Early fossil eukaryotes were benthic aerobes.Nature · 2026Article
- Signatures of gene transfer in the parallel evolution of osmotrophic specialization in eukaryotes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Manzamine-A: Unraveling the Chemical and Biological Tapestry of a Marine-Derived Drug Lead.Marine drugs · 2026Review
- The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Hypoxia-induced gene expression changes in N. vectensis embryos.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Machine learning-based paleobathymetric reconstructions using archaeal lipid biomarkers.Science advances · 2026Article
- Earth system simulations suggest that the Proterozoic ocean was greener but less productive.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Outsourcing of energetically costly amino acids at the origin of animals.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis-GC-MS and supervised machine learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Experimental taphonomy of marine algae and cyanobacteria reveals the decoupling of morphological and chemical decay patterns.iScience · 2025Article
- Chemical characterization of CProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Eukaryotes expansion into non-marine habitats prohibited by nitrogen limitation during the mid-Proterozoic.iScience · 2025Article
- A diverse Palaeoproterozoic microbial ecosystem implies early eukaryogenesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The chitin raft hypothesis for the colonization of the open ocean by cyanobacteria.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- A red algal polysaccharide influences the multicellular development of the choanoflagellate Salpingoeca rosetta.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Article
- Ocean deoxygenation after the Sturtian Snowball.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Biosignatures of diverse eukaryotic life from a Snowball Earth analogue environment in Antarctica.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Rise of Algae promoted eukaryote predation in the Neoproterozoic benthos.Science advances · 2025Article
53 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The transition from dominant bacterial to eukaryotic marine primary productivity was one of the most profound ecological revolutions in the Earth's history, reorganizing the distribution of carbon and nutrients in the water column and increasing energy flow to higher trophic levels. But the causes and geological timing of this transition, as well as possible links with rising atmospheric oxygen levels and the evolution of animals, remain obscure. Here we present a molecular fossil record of eukaryotic steroids demonstrating that bacteria were the only notable primary producers in the oceans before the Cryogenian period (720-635 million years ago). Increasing steroid diversity and abundance marks the rapid rise of marine planktonic algae (Archaeplastida) in the narrow time interval between the Sturtian and Marinoan 'snowball Earth' glaciations, 659-645 million years ago. We propose that the incumbency of cyanobacteria was broken by a surge of nutrients supplied by the Sturtian deglaciation. The 'Rise of Algae' created food webs with more efficient nutrient and energy transfers, driving ecosystems towards larger and increasingly complex organisms. This effect is recorded by the concomitant appearance of biomarkers for sponges and predatory rhizarians, and the subsequent radiation of eumetazoans in the Ediacaran period.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.