#silurian — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #silurian, aggregated by home.social.
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Low Sinuosity Meandering Rivers Before Vascular Plants - Cambrian Tapeats Formation, Arizona, USA
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https://doi.org/10.1130/B38336.1 <-- shared paper
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#water #hydrology #Arizona #bars #braided #streams #Cambrian #channels #clastic #conglomerate #floodplains #fluvial #hydromorphology #sedimentation #landscape #LowerCambrian #meander #mechanism #migration #mudstone #Paleozoic #Plantae #pointbar #rivers #sandstone #sedimentary #Silurian #sinuosity #UnitedStates #USA #TapeatsFormation
@GSA -
My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...
Here's a study of Kingnites, commissioned in 2022 for a project I cannot talk about yet. Kingnites, is an exceptionally large (1m long) Silurian polychaete annelid.
#Art #Painting #PaleoArt #PalaeoArt #SciArt #SciComm #DigitalArt #Illustration #Dinosaurs #Palaeontology #Paleontology #Kingnites #Silurian #Polychaete #Annelid #Worm #Fossil
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Today's #mega...er... organisms...are prototaxites. These large, columnar fossils date to 240-350 million years, and stood 24 feet tall and 3 feet wide when they were alive. During this time period, both plants and animals on land were still quite small--meaning that #prototaxites formed the dominant feature of the land during the #Silurian and #Devonian periods.
But what exactly were these giant spires? First described in 1859, they were originally thought to be very early trees. However, their internal structure of tiny, criss-crossing tubes suggests that this is not correct. Chemical analysis also indicates that prototaxites gained their energy from diverse sources--ruling out the idea that they were plants.
This leads to the conclusion that prototaxites were giant, spire-like mushrooms--and the researchers who completed the analysis suggested that their height helped them to spread spores in an otherwise low-laying landscape.
An alternative explanation--perhaps attempting to account for the prototaxites' unusual height--suggests that they were a matted mixture of liverworts, fungus, and cyanobacteria that got rolled up by external forces and never stood upright. This has been disputed based on the fossils' anatomy and chemical makeup.
