Vanderbilt Researchers Combine Paleontology and Fluid Physics to Uncover Ediacaran Nurseries
Knowing how life worked on Earth 550 million years ago can give perspective on how life could evolve on other planets. Geobiologist and Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Simon Darroch and postdoctoral researcher Brandt Gibson are working to figure that out.
“At the broadest scale, understanding how, when, and why complex life evolved on this planet gives us a sense for how likely it is that we’ll find complex life elsewhere in the solar system, and what it may look like,” Darroch said. “I honestly can’t think of anything cooler to be working on.”
Their research features strange, vase-like organisms (in the genus Ernietta) that lived in the Ediacaran era—approximately 635 million to 541 million years ago. These organisms lived in marine environments, where fluid dynamics drive the evolution of the organisms that inhabit them.