Sentences with word «rangeomorph»

For 40 million years, fern - like organisms called rangeomorphs ruled the world, because their branching bodies made them perfect diffusion feeders

This means that the sudden appearance of rangeomorphs at large size could have been a direct result of major changes in climate and ocean chemistry.

Since rangeomorphs don't resemble any modern organism, it's difficult to understand how they fed, grew or reproduced, let alone how they might link with any modern group.

A new study has found that Ediacaran organisms known as rangeomorphs reproduced by taking a joint approach: they first sent out an «advance party» to settle in a new area, followed by rapid colonization of the new neighborhood.

But, as Jennifer Hoyal - Cuthill, who studies rangeomorphs at the University of Cambridge, points out, getting hold of Dendrogramma DNA is at least possible: extracting DNA from 500 - million - year - old Ediacaran fossils is not.

However, while rangeomorphs were highly suited to their Ediacaran environment, conditions in the oceans continued to change and from about 541 million years ago the «Cambrian Explosion» began — a period of rapid evolutionary development when most major animal groups first appeared in the fossil record.

The researchers used micro-CT scanning, photographic measurements and mathematical and computer models to examine rangeomorph fossils from south - eastern Newfoundland, Canada, the UK and Australia.

With Simon Conway Morris, she studied how the anatomy of 11 types of rangeomorph evolved, using fossils to create computer replicas of each one.

«Reproduction in this way made rangeomorphs highly successful, since they could both colonize new areas and rapidly spread once they got there,» Dr Mitchell said.

Inspired by a 2009 FCL team retreat and field trip to Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, coauthors David Jacobs, Roger Summons, David Johnston, and Marc Laflamme used models of canopy flow to explain how sticking up into the water column provided rangeomorphs, some of these earliest multicellular organisms preserved at Mistaken Point, a competitive advantage over microbial mats.

In July Guy Narbonne of Queen's University in Ontario reported a new population of fossils, called rangeomorphs.

«Rangeomorphs don't look like anything else in the fossil record, which is why they're such a mystery.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have determined how some of the first large organisms, known as rangeomorphs, were able to grow up to two metres in height, by changing their body size and shape as they extracted nutrients from their surrounding environment.

When the conditions changed, the rangeomorphs were doomed and nothing quite like them has been seen since.

For example, rangeomorphs could rapidly «shape - shift,» growing into a long, tapered shape if the seawater above them happened to have elevated levels of oxygen.

Hoyal Cuthill and her co-author Professor Simon Conway Morris suggest that rangeomorphs not only show a strong degree of ecophenotypic plasticity, but that this provided a crucial advantage in a dramatically changing world.

Some rangeomorphs were only a few centimetres in height, while others were up to two metres tall.

Rangeomorphs were some of the earliest large organisms on Earth, existing during a time when most other forms of life were microscopic in size.

A new analysis of their fossils suggests that rangeomorphs» strange bodies evolved to absorb as much food as possible from the surrounding water.

«This is the first look inside such a unique specimen of a rangeomorph,» says Alana Sharp of University College London, who led the team conducting the scans.

It is a member of an Ediacaran group called the rangeomorphs that looked a bit like large petals.

That's not to say that there weren't some truly exotic Ediacarans, including a group of 2 - metre - long feather - like organisms called the rangeomorphs.

They lived in the shadow of the Rangeomorphs, he says, but when these larger organisms went extinct the small Ediacarans may have flourished, evolving into familiar animals.

Using statistical techniques to assess the distribution of populations of a rangeomorph called Fractofusus, Dr Mitchell and co-authors observed that larger «grandparent» rangeomorphs were randomly distributed in their environment, and were surrounded by distinct patterns of smaller «parents» and «children.»

Like many of the life forms during the Ediacaran, rangeomorphs mysteriously disappeared at the start of the Cambrian period, which began about 540 million years ago, so it has been difficult to link rangeomorphs to any modern organisms, or to figure out how they lived, what they ate and how they reproduced.

Rangeomorphs were some of the earliest complex organisms on Earth, and have been considered to be some of the first animals — although it's difficult for scientists to be entirely sure.