Calibrating the coevolution of Ediacaran life and environment

Significance Our understanding of the interactions between animal evolution, biogeochemical cycling, and global tectonics during the Ediacaran Period (635 to 541 Ma) is severely hampered by lack of a robust temporal framework. The appearance and extinction of the earliest fossil animals are hypothesized to correlate with upheavals in biogeochemical cycles—foremost the Shuram carbon isotope excursion, possibly the largest known disturbance to the global carbon cycle. However, without age constraints on the excursion’s timing and duration, its driving mechanisms, global synchroneity, and role in Ediacaran geobiological evolution cannot be evaluated. We provide radioisotopic ages for the onset and termination of the Shuram, evaluate its global synchroneity, and show that it is divorced from the rise of the earliest preserved animal ecosystems. The rise of animals occurred during an interval of Earth history that witnessed dynamic marine redox conditions, potentially rapid plate motions, and uniquely large perturbations to global biogeochemical cycles. The largest of these perturbations, the Shuram carbon isotope excursion, has been invoked as a driving mechanism for Ediacaran environmental change, possibly linked with evolutionary innovation or extinction. However, there are a number of controversies surrounding the Shuram, including its timing, duration, and role in the concomitant biological and biogeochemical upheavals. Here we present radioisotopic dates bracketing the Shuram on two separate paleocontinents; our results are consistent with a global and synchronous event between 574.0 ± 4.7 and 567.3 ± 3.0 Ma. These dates support the interpretation that the Shuram is a primary and synchronous event postdating the Gaskiers glaciation. In addition, our Re-Os ages suggest that the appearance of Ediacaran macrofossils in northwestern Canada is identical, within uncertainty, to similar macrofossils from the Conception Group of Newfoundland, highlighting the coeval appearance of macroscopic metazoans across two paleocontinents. Our temporal framework for the terminal Proterozoic is a critical step for testing hypotheses related to extreme carbon isotope excursions and their role in the evolution of complex life.

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