Since the Cambrian explosion 538.8 million years ago – a time when many of the animal phyla we're familiar with today were established – five major mass extinction events have whittled down the biodiversity of all creatures great and small.
that dominated the seafloors. Previously many of the animals were stuck-in-place filter feeders.
Feeding modes did not change in this way between the White Sea and the last stage, known as the Nama . Rather, a staggering 80 percent of species seemed to vanish between these two stages of the Ediacaran. Past research has suggested that this decline may have been the result of mobile animals that burrowed or left trace fossils, which profoundly altered the environment and slowly replaced sessile filter feeders. This new evidence suggests that was not the case.
All types of feeding modes and life habits experienced similar losses, with only 14 genera still seen in the Nama out of 70 known groups from the earlier White Sea stage. If more newly evolved species had taken over, there also would have been temporal overlap between the new and the old species.
"By maximizing the relative proportions of cells in direct contact with seawater, high surface-area taxa would have been comparatively better adapted to survive in low-oxygen environments," the team
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