Journal article
A crown-group cnidarian from the Ediacaran of Charnwood Forest, UK
- Abstract:
- Cnidarians are a disparate and ancient phylum, encompassing corals and jellyfish, and occupy both the pelagic and benthic realms. They have a rich fossil record from the Phanerozoic eon lending insight into the early history of the group but, although cnidarians diverged from other animals in the Precambrian period, their record from the Ediacaran period (635–542 million years ago) is controversial. Here, we describe a new fossil cnidarian—Auroralumina attenboroughii gen. et sp. nov.—from the Ediacaran of Charnwood Forest (557–562 million years ago) that shows two bifurcating polyps enclosed in a rigid, polyhedral, organic skeleton with evidence of simple, densely packed tentacles. Auroralumina displays a suite of characters allying it to early medusozoans but shows others more typical of Anthozoa. Phylogenetic analyses recover Auroralumina as a stem-group medusozoan and, therefore, the oldest crown-group cnidarian. Auroralumina demonstrates both the establishment of the crown group of an animal phylum and the fixation of its body plan tens of millions of years before the Cambrian diversification of animal life.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 6.1MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41559-022-01807-x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Ecology and Evolution More from this journal
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 8
- Pages:
- 1095-1104
- Publication date:
- 2022-07-25
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-05-23
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2397-334X
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1269807
- Local pid:
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pubs:1269807
- Deposit date:
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2022-07-26
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Dunn et al
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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