#ediacarian

[what-manner-of-beaft-poll]

What Beaft shall ye be, Ediacarian edition

Lore post with descriptions of the options

Suck Tube

Murder Asshole

Scum Licking Bottom Dweller

A Secret Nth thing

#polls #ediacarian #zoology #phylogeny #paleontology #animals #evolution #poll blog

[yee-qi]

Even more phyla of sophonts

The Augments over Those Before, sapient AI that overtook their creators due to their extra senses (that is, being able to detect light, sound and heat, unlike their purely tactile creators). As AI, they're free to take whatever form they want, but as their minds were modelled after priapulid worms (in a world where the Ediacarian "wormworld" ended up securing burrower dominance for years to come), they tend to be fine with a body roughly resembling one (with some abstraction). They have little idea of aesthetic or music and are not much for self-expression, so these days they're sparsely distributed outside of their homeworld, where vast quantities of Augments gather and communicate.

The Pillars of God, sophont loricifera caught in the midst of a microbial war. In their world, the great oxygenation event only happened halfway. Archaea and bacteria clashed, with worldwide effects as the bacteria tried spewing O2 into the air and the archaea kept pumping out sulfuric compounds. Only those not relying on high oxygen concentrations could survive, and out of all of those, the loricifera made the jump to a full dual-respiration setup: Breathing both oxygen and sulfur. The world burned several times, the microbial war grew evermore. Forests of differing physiology waxed and waned. And out of the ashes came the Pillars. Their language is nearly indecipherable and so is their thought-process. As indicated by their chosen name, they're evidently capable of being religious, though.

Sand Dragons are kinorhynchans that evolved sapience in order to better find and memorize food in vast tracts of desert. Extreme omnivores, they will devour almost anything. Like their ancestors, they go through several molts; each one having a different niche and slowly-but-surely becoming more intelligent. They can live two hundred years at most and have incredible memories, although they're a bit less creative than other species and are generally averse to change. To discover the particle accelerator, their civilization could have existed for millions of years! Juveniles are not schooled, but many end up quite educated anyways simply by choosing to commit to a task and spending significant amounts of time around people doing them. They are not welcomed in academic spaces, but are also not rejected, and this tends to apply to most Sand Dragons. They're generally apathetic towards other sophonts, including of their own kind.

#phyla challenge #fellow tetrapod #yee art #speculative evolution #spec evo

[transgenderer]

can you imagine living in the ediacarian before any predators. just chilling in the big empty ocean

wikipedia calls its article about the ediacarin "part of a seires on the cambrian explosion" which is like a hate crime

anyway

As a rule, Dickinsonia fossils are preserved as negative impressions ("death masks") on the bases of sandstone beds.

does anyone actually cal it a death mask

[antediluvianechoes]

Ediacaran Life, John D. Dawson, for National Geographic Magazine, April 1998

Hello, Dickinsonia, you creeping thumbprint of the seafloor. You and your friends baffle, looking like living bubble wrap, waving in warm washes, wriggling over sediments; your fronts and backs, tops and bottoms, mouth and anuses all too vague in orientation. When you are as big as a quarter, you’re a charmer; as big as a pancake, a curiosity; but when you’re as big as bath towel, you’re a nightmare. 

#ediacarian #dickinsonia #precambrian #john d dawson

[paleotanks]

Ediacarian life, University of Nebraska State Museum, Lincoln, NE

5/18/19

#paleozoic #aquarium #university of nebraska state museum #morrill hall #jellyfish

[fromthedust]

Dickinsonia  - fossil sea creature - 558 million years ago - Ediacaran Period 

First discovered in 1946 (described 1947) in Australia, the segmented, pancake-shaped fossils  can run up to one meter in length, but there was no evidence to suggest that this Pre-Cambrian fossil was an animal or something else. The creature, called Dickinsonia, has been described as looking a bit like a jellyfish, a worm, a fungus and a lichen. Scientific debate raged for over 70 years as to exactly how to classify the fossil as it was not much like anything now living.

Although Dickinsonia fossils have now been found at dozens of sites across the world, they are typically found solely as two-dimensional imprints in sandstone. Then in 2016, Ilya Bobrovskiy, a graduate student at Australian National University, made a startling discovery of Dickinsonia fossils in Russia that were essentially mummified in a mixture of clay and sandstone. The resulting study allowed scientists to determine conclusively that the fossil is of a multi-cellular animal.  This early animal was flat — perhaps only two or three cells thick, with the bottom most layer of cells serving as its stomach. The shallow areas of the Ediacarian seafloor were covered with a gooey carpet of single-celled microbes and algae. Dickensonia would have crept atop this 'microbial mat' digesting the microbes and algae beneath it.    

Dickinsonia now holds the record as the oldest macroscopic creature in the fossil record from the end of the Ediacaran (Pre-Cambrian) Period — and is now considered to be our oldest ancestor.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/say-hello-to-dickinsonia-the-animal-kingdoms-newest-and-oldest-member/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4900142/Strange-segmented-Dickinsonia-organism-animal.html

https://www.inverse.com/article/49169-dickinsonia-lived-before-cambrian-explosion

#Dickinsonia #fossil #animal #crittery #ancient #ancient life

[haootia]

i love the ediacarian life really just did fucking whatever

[kare3000]

Livescience.com: Genes of 500 million-year-old sea monsters live inside us

Livescience.com: Genes of 500 million-year-old sea monsters live inside us. https://www.livescience.com/ediacarian-creatures-share-genes-with-humans.html

View On WordPress

[piplup-mafia]

how does the college scoring work in uk

Its pretty easy tbh. All numbers are percentages btw. Sorry for the weird paragraph spacing, if I accidentally smack the enter key on mobile I can't reverse it 8/

You need 40 to pass and get a third. You CAN get less than 40 and pass, but it's considered essentially worthless to get the 35-40 grade. I'd say 40 is an American D? If you get less than 40 overall on a module you have to resit. I've gotten 31 on an exam before but since I had 80 on the other side it pulled me into pass territory. You're locked at 40 for a resit and can't get higher.

You need 50 to get a 2:2, which is considered the baseline employable grade for grad jobs. If you get 58 or 59 your grade is sometimes considered a 2:1 depending on the circumstances - my paleo grade this time is considered a 2:1 since the entire department knows I'm just sucky at essay style exams and my actual ability is higher than 2:2. I'd call this one a C-B-.

You need 60 for a 2:1, which is the general 'you can get pretty much any job you want with this' grade. They very rarely give out 69s as an actual mark (not nice). Much like the 2:2/2:1 boundary if you're 68-69 it can be considered a first. My average is in this bracket and I have so many credits in it that it's essentially impossible for me to fall out of it unless I severely cock up my masters project. This is a B-A- depending where you fall in the bracket.

You need 70 for a first, which is what people who are wanting to do a PhD aim for or what employers who only want the 'cream of the crop' ask for. I'm not gunning for either so any firsts are just a nice surprise for me and help keep my average up. 80 or higher is a high first but you don't get any garnishes or anything like that, they're just good for your overall average. This is an A-A+. If I get 75 or higher on my masters project then I'll actually get a first on my overall degree even though I'm currently sitting at a mid 2:1 since its such a huge slice of the course (50% of my entire degree lol)

Now if you're thinking 'wow! those are low percentages, a british degree must be piss easy!' you're being ignorant, because exams and coursework are calibrated with those marks above in mind and if the marker thinks you fall in a bracket they'll stick you in it.

Say you're me and you submit a shitty unfinished essay on palaeontology that has a cute cartoon of some ediacarian biota. The marker goes 'this is a 2:2' so puts me in the 50s, then says 'but that's a cute kimbrella' and gives me 56. Its actually really difficult to get higher than 80 on stuff and if you came over with 95% essays in America you'd be in the 70's here. I pretty consistently get high 2:1s or low 1sts nowadays on anything that isn't an exam, which makes me pretty average in my class, but I'm also the best artist/visual designer there, which is where my niche is. Those skills are more important than you'd think in geology!

As for with honours and stuff, I think that's related to the amount of credits you have. I'll graduate with honours as will everyone who's done a geology degree at my uni.

I, uh, hope that makes sense. Can someone explain the american one to me now? Your numbers be too big

#long post #anon ask #im aiming for a first overall via my project wish me luck!

[what-manner-of-beaft-poll]

Ediacarian Period

~540 million years ago, life was almost entirely in the ocean. On the seafloor were mats of single-cellular organisms photosynthesizing and eating each other. It looked like this:

Slime everywhere. The moon was closer then, which meant that days were shorter by about 2 hours, and tides were stronger and more rapid than in the modern day.

Some multicellular life had emerged, but much of it will not make it into the next period. The animals which will survive into the present day can be classified into just a few groups:

1. Suck Tubes. These animals are essentially just a colony of cells that work together to move water through the holes in their body and filter out the tasty bits. There are two main kinds of cells: one is flagellated (has a long tail-like structure) (like a sperm cell) that it wiggles to create a small current. The other is a flat rigid cell which provides structure, holds the organism together, and can move parts of the whole organism by expanding or contracting. They are full of a gel-like substance that helps maintain the shape and structure. Together they form tube-like structures to magnify the current from the flagellated cells and thus suck up more food. They are stationary but can adjust their own shapes to take advantage of local pre-existing water currents. Sometimes if they're broken apart they can come back together again, or even regrow what they lost.

2. Murder Assholes. These animals are more complicated. The cells have ways of talking to each other (nervous systems) and more complex ways of moving (muscles). They mostly use this to grab things that float by with their tentacles and stab them with poison and then stuff them into their mouth which is also their anus by the way. They exhibit "radial symmetry" where their body plan is shaped like a circle or disk. As far as we know these were the first predators. Some of them instead weren't anchored to anything, and used contractions of their mouth-ass to swim around and hunt things down and kill them by the tried and true "stabs you with poison" method. Terrifying.

3. Scum Licking Bottom Dwellers these guys had an internal body cavity, AND a separate mouth and anus. They used it to crawl around in the slime and lick it all up. Yum yum. they had a thick rigid shell-like membrane on their backs which protected them from predators and enabled them to get more leverage for their muscles. They also have bilateral symmetry (their body forms along a line and not a circle)

4. A Secret Fourth (fifth, sixth, seventh, ....?) Thing. Honestly i kinda have no idea what's going on with a lot of pre-Cambrian stuff. Lots of lineages don't show up until the Cambrian conclusively, but various theories suggest they would have existed alongside other Ediacarian animals. They'll show up soon though if you vote for this option. Check my #polls tag soon for the poll

#Lorepost #ediacarian #precambrian #polls #phylogeny #paleontology #poll blog

[duiytuviovwo]

Precambrian Ediacaran (Ediacarian, Vendian) fossil Cyclomedusa davidi: 122.5$ Price . End… https://t.co/prdJJYTyo8

Precambrian Ediacaran (Ediacarian, Vendian) fossil Cyclomedusa davidi: 122.5$ Price . End… https://t.co/prdJJYTyo8

— Duiytu.Viovwo (@duiytu) July 21, 2018

from Twitter https://twitter.com/duiytu via http://twitter.com/duiytu/status/1020593036353556481

#IFTTT #Twitter

[what-manner-of-beaft-poll]

a quick runoff election between the top two responses to this poll (they tied for first)

lorepost with descriptions of the two options as well as the ones that didn't make it

I hate doing this but pls reblog for bigger sample size!! I am setting this one to 1 day so we can move on to the Cambrian quickly

#poll blog #paleontology #phylogeny #ediacarian #animals #zoology #polls

[what-manner-of-beaft-poll]

Hello tumblr, this is a poll blog I made to determine what sort of animal tumblr is! I am restricting us to animals because the question of "what manner of beaft" is a funny little ear worm who lives in my head.

That said, I will try to run this blog more or less following the earth's natural history and present the evolutionary specializations as choices you all can make in the moment, as though you were a critter evolving. I will also try to make lore and context posts for relevant geological epochs, where I outline what the world is like as we are voting. To help us all RP as the little guys who were living it.

That means you can expect the first lorepost to be about the Ediacarian period.

I am going to limit options solely to extant lineages (lineages with living members) to keep us out of dead ends. And also to spare you all from my Cotylorhynchus obsession.

Polls will be tagged as #polls

loreposts will be tagged as #loreposts

asks are always welcome

Disclaimer: I am not a biologist or paleontologist, I just like creachers.

#polls #poll blog #zoology #phylogeny #paleontology #animals

[kare3000]

Livescience.com: Genes of 500 million-year-old sea monsters live inside us

Livescience.com: Genes of 500 million-year-old sea monsters live inside us. https://www.livescience.com/ediacarian-creatures-share-genes-with-humans.html

View On WordPress