Nuovo studio su Dickinsonia costata

Highly regulated growth and development of the Ediacara macrofossil Dickinsonia costata

by Scott D. Evans, Mary L. Droser, James G.Gehling

Un nuovo ed interessante articolo è apparso sulla rivista PLOS e disponibile gratuitamente trattante Dickinsonia costata, questo iconico organismo che ha vissuto alla fine del Neoproterozoico e che si trova con estema frequenza nel biota di Ediacara in Australia, White Sea in Russia e segnalato anche in Ukraina.

Mi ripropongo di tornare sull'argomento in futuro, quindi per ora mi limito a postare solo il link e l'abstract della pubblicazione.

La pubblicazione è disponibile a questo indirizzo:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176874&type=printable

Abstract:

The Ediacara Biota represents the oldest fossil evidence for the appearance of animals but linking these taxa to specific clades has proved challenging.

Dickinsonia is an abundant, apparently bilaterally symmetrical Ediacara fossil with uncertain affinities. We identified and measured key morphologic al features of over 900 specimens of Dickinsonia costata from the Ediacara Member, South Australia to characterize patterns in growth and morphology.

Here we show that development in Dickinsonia costata was surprisingly highly regulated to maintain an ovoid shape via terminal addition and the predictable expansion of modules. This result, along with other characters found in Dickinsonia suggests that it does not belong within known animal groups, but that it utilized some of the developmental gene networks of bilaterians, a result predicted by gene sequencing of basal metazoans but previously unidentified in the fossil record.

Dickinsonia thus represents an extinct clade located between sponges and the last common ancestor of Protostomes and Deuterostomes, and likely belongs within the Eumetazoa.