#Charnia

[shibesky]

Would the dungeon trudgers eat Cambrian critters? Probably.

[palaeosinensis]

Alright science art and paleo art folks go gentle on me. If I was to do these for a gallery showing I think I'd need at least a couple of weeks for research and notes alone. More if I reached out to researchers for paper access and feedback. Speculative armored invertebrates, Dickinsonia, speculative medusa, Charnia, Spriggina, Kimberella, Arkarua, & their trace fossils.

[styllwaters]

Attack for @leensor!

[palaeoiris]

Transgeder Pride Flag+Charnia sketch for the Trans Visibility Week.

Personal use with credit welcome and encouraged ^^

[pokemonjunge]

Charnia

In the distant past of our planet, deep beneath the waves of the ocean, a strange creature has made a living in the pitch black of the deep sea.

Harvesting the energy of a hydrothermal vent, a colony of Charnia glows ghostly in the floodlight of the submarine. What exactly are they? Animal, plant, something entirely different? Finally, this question will be answered…

[katborg82]

In 1957, schoolboy Roger Mason and his friends were rock climbing in Charnwood Forest in central England where they stumbled across a strange leaf-like pattern embedded in the rocks. The unusual fossil was brought to the attention of local geologist Trevor Ford, who published the discovery in the Journal of the Yorkshire Geological Society. This fossil is particularly fascinating as the rock layers in the area are known to be Precambrian in age. A time previously thought to be prior to the appearance of complex life.

Charnia (named after the Charnwood Forest in which it was discovered) was an unusual frond-like lifeform from the late Ediacaran period, 570-550 Mya. It had segmented leaf-like ridges branching out from the center asymmetrically, indicating it likely evolved before bilateral symmetry, a feature present in nearly every living thing today. Specimens have been found ranging anywhere from 1cm to 66cm in length. It lived on the sea floor feeding on nutrients in the water, and despite its plant-like appearance, the nature of the fossil beds it was discovered in indicates it lived too deep to effectively photosynthesize like plants do. Instead, our current understanding of the lifeform places it as an early member of the animal kingdom.

Charnia is a significant discovery as it is the first Precambrian fossil to be identified as such, completely changing our understanding of how life came to be. So little is currently known about Ediacaran biota that we don't know how or even if these creatures are related to life today.

[funcambrianfacts]

Fun Cambrian fact #13!

[newlabdakos]

Over the next couple of weeks I will do daily posts of prehistoric creatures, starting with the oldest.

I'd previously posted this series of posts on my old blog, which has been deleted by tumblr.

Charnia

(temporal range: 570-550 mio. years ago)

[text from the Wikipedia article, see also link above]

Charnia is a genus of frond-like lifeforms belonging to the Ediacaran biota with segmented, leaf-like ridges branching alternately to the right and left from a zig-zag medial suture (thus exhibiting glide reflection, or opposite isometry). The genus Charnia was named for Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, England, where the first fossilised specimen was found. Charnia is significant because it was the first Precambrian fossil to be recognized as such.

The living organism grew on the sea floor and is believed to have fed on nutrients in the water. Despite Charnia's fern-like appearance, it is not a photosynthetic plant or alga because the nature of the fossilbeds where specimens have been found implies that it originally lived in deep water, well below the photic zone where photosynthesis can occur.

[vickysaurus-art]

For all the long eons of the Earth, the shores have remained empty. But now, something is stirring in the depths, and after each storm that rages across the seemingly barren world, strange creatures wash up on the beach. In death, they announce to the land the first animal life in the Ediacaran sea.

I've wanted to draw the strange Ediacaran life that pre-dated even the Cambrian explosion for a while now, but had been struggling to find an interesting way to depict them. With little behaviour to show, I find Ediacaran paleoart has a bit of a tendency to end up looking like a pretty aquarium with all the organisms nicely arranged together for the viewer's enjoyment. I landed on painting them washing up on the empty shore. It's also me experimenting with watercolours instead of my usual coloured pencils.

[vickysaurus]

Ediacaran fossils with some lovely jelly-looking restorations.

[exoflash]

hey guys how would i go about making a fossil fakemon based on charnia /genq

[autistickaitovocaloid]

Birthday boy at the bottom of an ancient ocean

[palaeoiris]

Progress Pride Flag + Charnia sketch

[eldritchneuro]

I think my favorite thing about plant biology (in particular going by Stampede's lore) is that there's no reason for it to make any sense. Like:

Are connected to a higher dimension that can presumably create any basic material with the right code, likely including things like sustenance and biological material needed to sustain themselves, meaning no evolutionary pressure to hunt/eat/drink/what have you besides 'get a human to key in the code for some amino acids from the sister that produces them'

If essentials for survival are spread out between different sisters, this may provide an explanation for the hivemind thing. RIP the one sister who produces nutrients and who ends up being used by the whole colony as an alien menulog

Can apparently produce an entirely different being in the form of Independents, who are apparently almost human in their genetic makeup (does this mean that they could theoretically just... birth random animals other than humans or something? Is this like, convergent evolution? Vash says Dependents need humans to survive, are Independents a way for plants to create their own caretakers?)

Stampede lore has it that Dependents are essentially GMOs, being created from a basal 'angel mummy' infused with human DNA, meaning that there may not be any evolutionary reason for looking half-human besides from the fact that some rando thought it would look cool

On that note, this means that between the transferal between common ancestor to Dependent to Independent, plants probably have some fucked up genetics. Independents are essential the plant equivalent of horrifically inbred dogs that have been designed to look like humans, so really any biological feature would probably make sense given that plants probably have the most not-normal evolutionary history like... ever.

Side note: are plants like... literal plants? Are they like fungi, which look like plants but are actually more similar to animals? If you put plant cells under a microscope would you find cell walls and chloroplasts?

[carbohs-region]

Charniplex, the Fractal Pokémon!

Type: Dark/Ground

Instead of growing by branching off new segments or growing bilaterally, Charniplexes would actually expand fractally; starting from the base, it would grow a lobe off one side of its central axis, then the other side, then the other. This process is called glide reflection, and it creates Charniplex’s distinctive asymmetric pattern.

[katborg82]

At the start of the Neoproterozoic, the first animals would emerge, and after surviving another series of ice ages, we would see the first complex life, although for now it is still very simple and seemingly alien. It is still a subject of debate how these creatures fit into the tree of life. Are they the earliest ancestors of modern life? Are they simply an entirely separate branch that died off after this period? Scientists still aren't sure. I may do a separate post about the bizarre fauna of the Ediacaran period.

At this point we're already around 4 billion years into the story of Earth, with only about 500 million years to the present. Tomorrow we will be exploring a whole new eon.