ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Developmental processes in Ediacara macrofossils.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Earliest evidence of behavioural handedness in the Ediacaran motile bilaterian Spriggina floundersi.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- An Increase in Animal Diversity was Facilitated by Ecologically-Driven Brain Complexity Throughout the Cambrian.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Review
- Earth's magnetic field and its relationship to the origin of life, evolution and planetary habitability.National science review · 2025Review
- Morphogenesis of Fractofusus andersoni and the nature of early animal development.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Evolution of selfish multicellularity: collective organisation of individual spatio-temporal regulatory strategies.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Ediacara Biota preserves the oldest fossil evidence of abundant, complex metazoans. Despite their significance, assigning individual taxa to specific phylogenetic groups has proved problematic. To better understand these forms, we identify developmentally controlled characters in representative taxa from the Ediacaran White Sea assemblage and compare them with the regulatory tools underlying similar traits in modern organisms. This analysis demonstrates that the genetic pathways for multicellularity, axial polarity, musculature, and a nervous system were likely present in some of these early animals. Equally meaningful is the absence of evidence for major differentiation of macroscopic body units, including distinct organs, localized sensory machinery or appendages. Together these traits help to better constrain the phylogenetic position of several key Ediacara taxa and inform our views of early metazoan evolution. An apparent lack of heads with concentrated sensory machinery or ventral nerve cords in such taxa supports the hypothesis that these evolved independently in disparate bilaterian clades.
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