ArticleScience advances2024
Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa.
Article in Science advances, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Re-evaluating molecular clock maximum age calibrations revives pre-Ediacaran divergence estimates for animals.Science advances · 2026Article
- Unique Tunicate Traits Possibly Encoded by Horizontally Transferred Genes.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Signatures of gene transfer in the parallel evolution of osmotrophic specialization in eukaryotes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
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- Independent origins of spicules reconcile paleontological and molecular evidence of sponge evolutionary history.Science advances · 2026Article
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- The Evolution of Large Organism Size: Disparate Physiologies Share a Foundation at the Smallest Physical Scales.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Chemical characterization of CProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Distributed neural computation and the evolution of the first brains.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- From nociception in aneural animals to human suffering: toward a comparative biology of pain.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Review
- Advanced adaptive strategies in an ancestral body plan: insights from a 510-Ma-old leptomitid sponge.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The evolution of reproduction in Ediacaran-Cambrian metazoans.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 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
- Constraining the lifespans of early animals of the Ediacaran.Biology letters · 2025Article
- A tiny Cambrian stem-mandibulate reveals independent evolution of limb tagmatization and specialization in early euarthropods.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Ecosystem relocation on Snowball Earth: Polar-alpine ancestry of the extant surface biosphere?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The timescale of animal diversification has been a focus of debate over how evolutionary history should be calibrated to geologic time. Molecular clock analyses have invariably estimated a Cryogenian or Tonian origin of animals while unequivocal animal fossils first occur in the Ediacaran. However, redating of key Ediacaran biotas and the discovery of several Ediacaran crown-Metazoa prompt recalibration of molecular clock analyses. We present revised fossil calibrations and use them in molecular clock analyses estimating the timescale of metazoan evolutionary history. Integrating across uncertainties including phylogenetic relationships, clock model, and calibration strategy, we estimate Metazoa to have originated in the early Ediacaran, Eumetazoa in the middle Ediacaran, and Bilateria in the upper Ediacaran, with many crown-phyla originating across the Ediacaran-Cambrian interval or elsewise fully within the Cambrian. These results are in much closer accord with the fossil record, coinciding with marine oxygenation, but they reject a literal reading of the fossil record.
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