Tommotian Small Shelly Fauna

The Tommotian fauna is a small shelly fauna found first on the Siberian Platform. The scale bars are all 1 millimetre.

Among the small shells are worm teeth. Toothed worms may have made short work of the soft-bodied Ediacaran creatures. For example, the fronds are plentiful in some record in some rocks right up to the appearance of worm teeth, then are no longer seen.

Ediacaran fronds surviving into the Cambrian, as those in Ireland dated at 510 Ma, may be relict populations in areas where it took the toothed worms a longer time to reach. other predators did not at first.

Photo: S. Bengston, in Evolution of the Earth, 1994 edition.

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