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Firstly, I am NOT an artist and will never claim to be one! I always have and will refer to my “art” as doodles. I draw these on my IPhone with my finger… that is by definition a doodle! Secondly, I recently realized that there is very little art for a vast majority of Ediacaran Biota. So, I want to eventually give them all their time to shine, even if it’s just doodles with some artistic liberties. This is just for fun after all. My first is Anfesta. I’m not 100% finished but I wanted to share anyways! Cheers!

Life in the Precambrian may have been much livelier than previously thought Vanderbilt University, May 19, 2017 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170519084411.htm https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/05/18/life-precambrian-livelier/ "The strange creatures that lived in the Garden of the Ediacaran more than 540 million years ago, before animals came on the scene, may have been much more dynamic than experts have thought." The paper is: Darroch, S., A. F., I. A. Rahman, B. Gibson, R. A. Racicot, and M. Laflamme, 2017, Inference of facultative mobility in the enigmatic Ediacaran organism Parvancorina. Biology Letters, 2017; 13 (5): 20170033 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0033 http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/13/5/20170033 Yours, Paul H.

Hi, @oxford clay keith @DE&i and anyone with any thoughts on the matter I go to two sites, within a few miles of each other, with exposures of the Oxford Clay. I've been puzzling at the difference between the biotas I find: Yaxley - Lots and lots of crinoid ossicles, vertebralis and surpula. Also plenty of gryphaea, belemnites and ammonites, the latter three dimensional and pyratised. Basically a lot of benthic critters, with some pelagic. King's dyke - No crinoids. No serpula. Haven't found verterbralis. There is evidence of pyrite, but this is usually a dusting over delicately preserved aragonite shells. There are gryphaea, but the benthic fauna seems less diverse. I'm baffled. I thought one possibility could be that Yaxley represents an oyster reef, glued together with serpula tubes. This would provide a firmer base for animals such as crinoids than the usual soupy mud of this period and location. Oyster reefs exist all over the world today, still exist off the coast of Britain, and there are very rare serpulid reefs off the coast of Scotland. Gryphaea are a form of oyster, and these unlike at King's dyke, are really encrusted with fantastic serpula tubes. I thought perhaps the Yaxley exposure was in the Jurassic slightly closer to a shore and sustaining reefs. There are some other important differences between the sites. Yaxley is an eroding former brick quarry, so relatively static, whereas at King's dyke the clay is supplied and renewed by the brick company from different layers of the Oxford Clay, and put on a site for fossil hunters. The preservation is very different, and in part that will be because the latter is fresh clay, just quarried. I could be as much looking at different layers as different locations. Both sites produce marine reptile fossils. But one seems more pelagic than benthic, the other more benthic than pelagic. Preservation bias could be playing a big role. Delicate fossils would not survive at Yaxley in the same way, leaving mostly heavily mineralised, hard fossils. All thought very welcome.