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Showing results for tags 'chlorophyte'.
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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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Hello, all. After my last wonderfully successful Id effort on here, i thought I'd try again. This specimen was boshed free of some matrix that was sent to me by the unrivalled Ralph @Nimravisin a batch of matrix from the Conasauga Formation, Upper Cambrian, Georgia, USA and home to a multitude of the trilobite Aphelaspis brachyphasis as well as rarer agnostids and other even rarer trilos. I was looking at this paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250083071_Exceptional_fossil_preservation_in_the_Conasauga_Formation_Cambrian_Northwestern_Georgia_USA and thought my specimen below looks rather like the example D in Figure 3 (sorry, I don't know how to just post that image. It's a chlorophyte, so is mine ? They appear to be sort of tiny strings of sausages, the longest string being about 2 mm long, so each individual 'cell' is very tiny indeed. Thank you for any comments, ideas or suggestions. Adam.