Ediacaran dinner party featured plenty to eat, adequate sanitation, computer model shows
Earth’s first dinner party wasn’t impressive, just a bunch of soft-bodied Ediacaran organisms sunk into sediment on the ocean floor, sharing in scraps of organic matter suspended in the water around them. But work from Evolution@Vanderbilt paleontologist Simon A.F. Darroch, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University, and Brandt M. Gibson, a Ph.D. student, recently published in the journal Science Advances provides support for the argument that they behaved like more modern-looking animals and evolved into shapes that helped them feed.