#tribrachidium

[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.

[crumchy-bones]

Some drawings I did in photoshop of Trilobozoa because I wanna get a tattoo of them. I think it’d be neat if I got glow-in-the-dark ink for the light parts. Definitely not enough art out there of these beauties.

[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.

[autistickaitovocaloid]

Birthday boy at the bottom of an ancient ocean

[a-treatise-on-velociraptors]

Prehistoric Nature is my favorite Minecraft mod hands-down. I just made a precambrian dimension portal, emptied my inventory completely, and spent a solid 30 minutes walking through a hadean wasteland just to stare at a low-poly version of the ediacaran biota for a few seconds.

[alphynix]

Trilobozoans (also known as triradialomorphs) are some of the more enigmatic members of the Ediacaran biota. In the past their unique three-way-symmetrical body plan was interpreted as linking them to groups like sponges, cnidarians, or echinoderms, but currently they're considered to be their own weird little phylum with uncertain evolutionary affinities, classified no more specifically than "probably some sort of early eumetazoan animal".

Lobodiscus tribrachialis is a newly-described member of this mysterious lineage. It lived in warm shallow marine waters covering what is now Southwestern China, and with an age of around 546 million years it's currently the youngest known trilobozoan, extending the group's time range by several million years.

About 3.7cm in diameter (~1.5"), it had the characteristic trilobozoan disc-shaped shield-like body, with a central depression surrounded by three triradially-symmetric lobes with branching ridges and grooves.

Its body would have been soft but fairly rigid, and it's not clear if it was capable of moving over the seafloor or if it had a more static lifestyle. Like its relative Tribrachidium it was probably a filter feeder, with the grooves on its surface directing water flow towards the central depression – and this surface ornamentation may also have been covered with cilia that actively caught and transported suspended food particles.

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References:

Ivantsov, A. Yu, and M. A. Zakrevskaya. "Trilobozoa, Precambrian tri-radial organisms." Paleontological Journal 55 (2021): 727-741. https://doi.org/10.1134/S0031030121070066

Ivantsov, Andrey, Aleksey Nagovitsyn, and Maria Zakrevskaya. "Traces of locomotion of Ediacaran macroorganisms." Geosciences 9.9 (2019): 395. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences9090395

Hall, C. M. S., et al. "The short-lived but successful tri-radial body plan: a view from the Ediacaran of Australia." Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 67.6 (2020): 885-895. https://doi.org/10.1080/08120099.2018.1472666

Rahman, Imran A., et al. "Suspension feeding in the enigmatic Ediacaran organism Tribrachidium demonstrates complexity of Neoproterozoic ecosystems." Science Advances 1.10 (2015): e1500800. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1500800

Zhao, Mingsheng, et al. "A putative triradial macrofossil from the Ediacaran Jiangchuan Biota." Iscience 27.2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.108823

Wikipedia contributors. “Lobodiscus.” Wikipedia, 29 Mar. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobodiscus

Wikipedia contributors. “Trilobozoa.” Wikipedia, 10 Mar. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobozoa

[alex-fictus]

Ediacara! If there’s any others I’m missing let me know!

Dickinsonia - Charnia

Spriggina - Mawsonites

Aspidella - Kimberella

Parvancorina - Tribrachidium

Shop || Phone Wallpapers

[yee-qi]

Perspectives #4

"Silent Sea" Dickinsonia/Kimberella/Tribrachidium Ediacaran, 556 million years ago, Ediacara Hills (Australia)

The Ediacaran Biota were a motley crew of strange animals of lineages unseen anywhere else. Many of them break traditional symmetry, and most were soft-bodied. Dickinsonia, the background critter, was a proarticulate displaying glide symmetry (probably), a sort of staggered segmentation unseen in any animal today. It slowly crawled over the seabed, grazing on microbial mats. Kimberella are the slugs, probably distantly related to today's mollusks. It seems like the overall plan of "lay low, have a shell and crawl on the floor" has served them well. Tribrachidium are the spiral guys, small filter feeders that used their unique shape to funnel water into their centers. Triradial symmetry is similarly unseen in modern life.

This is part 3 of my Perspectives series! For more, check out #perspectives on my blog.

[devonhalstondraedle]

A 3D model of Albumares brunsae, a Trilobozoan that hails from the Ediacaran of the White Sea, Russia.

These little things only grew up to around 1.5 - 2 cm in diameter, making them the smallest of their phylum. They are also amongst the few to have curved lobes (The other two being Lobodiscus and Tribrachidium

[dykegeology]

A rarely mentioned reason that firefox > chrome is that firefox's icon has a fox (a creature) whereas chrome just has some minimalist blobs of colour (not a creature. they look a bit like the ediacaran tribrachidium but I'm sure it's not intentional)

[paganwardrumbloodritual]

Tribrachidium of the Trilobozoa, extinct Precambrian sea floor tri-radial organisms (550 million years ago)

[downthegenderriver]

My favourite Ediacaran what-the-fuck Tribrachidium

[cherenkovs]

this fucking thing

[vickysaurus-art]

I've got a geologic timeline running along the walls of my new appartment, so I made some icons to mark the mass extinctions on it! They depict the Big Five, plus the End-Ediacaran extinction, some in a more literal fashion and some more metaphorically. Detailed look and explanations in reverse chronological order below the cut.

Cretaceous Paleogene Extinction: Meteorite hitting the Earth.

End-Triassic Extinction: Pangaea split by a line of fire to show the future mid-oceanic ridge massively erupting as the supercontinent breaks up.

The Great Dying: To depict the worst extinction of all time, I drew the Earth as a skull.

Late Devonian Extinction: The Late Devonian extinction may have been set off by the evolution of trees completely changing how the world's climate and cycles worked. By breaking up rock into soil they released massive amounts of nutrients into the environment, leading to anoxic waters. They reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere, causing a temperature drop. The knock-on effects of all this, possibly combined with a volcanic period, resulted in a mass extinction. To try and depict the trees indirectly killing life, I drew them literally killing it with their roots. Some of the victims are lobe-finned fish, jawless fish, brachiopods, trilobites, crinoids, and cystoids. Another root is turning into an ice crystal and another into a very eutrophic pool of algae-infested water.

Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: This one is considered to be the result of an ice age, so I drew a snow crystal. The middle part is also meant to be reminiscent of a bright star, in reference to the (not especially probable) hypothesis that it was set off by a nearby supernova.

End-Ediacaran Extinction: I really struggled with this one, as it's still fairly poorly understood, but is thought to involve a major anoxic event. But how do you clearly depict a lack of oxygen? It's not easy without resorting to drawing choking humans or crossed out oxygen formulas and such. Instead, I depicted the results of it: the disappearance of the Ediacaran biota and their replacement with the more familiar creatures of the Cambrian. This is a trilobite crawling over the fossils of a Dickinsonia, Charnia, and Tribrachidium.

[gaetaniu]

I paleontologi trovano le prime prove della selezione degli habitat nell'Ediacarano

Ecco come appariva Obamus coronatus, un minuscolo animale a corpo molle di forma toroidale del biota ediaco dell’Australia meridionale. I paleontologi hanno esaminato la distribuzione geografica di Tribrachidium, Rugoconites e Obamus, tre membri relativamente comuni del biota ediacariano (550 milioni di anni fa). “I mari dell’Ediacarano erano un luogo in gran parte estraneo rispetto agli…

[raininginthewest]

Tribrachidium in space!

Little postcard doodle.