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Showing results for tags 'green algae'.
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Illusory erect spines(?) on a Kimmswick receptaculitid
pefty posted a topic in General Fossil Discussion
UPDATE: These seem to just be weirdly incomplete cross-sections through ordinary cylindrical meroms. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This weekend in the Kimmswick Limestone in eastern Missouri (Pike County) I saw plenty of receptaculitid algae, mostly of genus Fisherites. But one cross-section has a feature I've never seen before: a fringe of what look like erect spines on the external surface. Can someone point me to a reference for understanding this feature functionally and/or taxonomically? I've looked in the usual places but I don't seem to be finding anything about spines. (If I were a vertebrate paleontologist, I would be saying they were feathers and proclaiming receptaculitids' "Sinosauropteryx moment.") Thanks.-
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- algae
- chlorophyceae
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This is a pretty great discovery! Quote from news article: "Scientists have found in rocks from northern China what may be the oldest fossils of a green plant ever found: tiny seaweed that carpeted areas of the seafloor 1bn years ago and were part of a primordial revolution among life on Earth." https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/24/tiny-chinese-seaweed-is-oldest-green-plant-fossil-ever-found Abstract from Nature: "Chlorophytes (representing a clade within the Viridiplantae and a sister group of the Streptophyta) probably dominated marine export bioproductivity and played a key role in facilitating ecosystem complexity before the Mesozoic diversification of phototrophic eukaryotes such as diatoms, coccolithophorans and dinoflagellates. Molecular clock and biomarker data indicate that chlorophytes diverged in the Mesoproterozoic or early Neoproterozoic, followed by their subsequent phylogenetic diversification, multicellular evolution and ecological expansion in the late Neoproterozoic and Palaeozoic. This model, however, has not been rigorously tested with palaeontological data because of the scarcity of Proterozoic chlorophyte fossils. Here we report abundant millimetre-sized, multicellular and morphologically differentiated macrofossils from rocks approximately 1,000 million years ago. These fossils are described as Proterocladus antiquus new species and are interpreted as benthic siphonocladalean chlorophytes, suggesting that chlorophytes acquired macroscopic size, multicellularity and cellular differentiation nearly a billion years ago, much earlier than previously thought." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1122-9
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- 2
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- chlorophyte
- green algae
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Hi everyone,I am in the process of cleaning some plates I collected recently and a couple is layered with this green covering. I removed quite a lot with alcohol and toothbrush. Does anyone have any better way to get it of. I wondered abit bleach but worried it might damage the fossils. Is this green covering harmful.