A new study provides further insight about the Ediacara biota, the earliest fossil record of communities composed of macroscopic, complex, multicellular organisms on Earth. Previous studies of Ediacara have focused on shallow-water communities. A team of researchers has now recovered data from a drill core of the Lantian Formation, which represents fossils from a deep-water community. The study draws comparisons between the deep-water and shallow-water studies, and shows that taphonomy and ecology were the primary factors controlling distribution of macrofossils in the Lantian Formation.

The paper, “Integrated carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen isotope chemostratigraphy of the Ediacaran Lantian Formation in South China: Spatial gradient, ocean redox oscillation, and fossil distribution,” was published in the journal Geobiology. The work was supported by NASA Astrobiology through the Exobiology & Evolutionary Biology Program.