Publication Date:
1998-02-18
Description:
Sponge remains have been identified in the Early Vendian Doushantuo phosphate deposit in central Guizhou (South China), which has an age of approximately 580 million years ago. Their skeletons consist of siliceous, monaxonal spicules. All are referred to as the Porifera, class Demospongiae. Preserved soft tissues include the epidermis, porocytes, amoebocytes, sclerocytes, and spongocoel. Among thousands of metazoan embryos is a parenchymella-type of sponge larvae having a shoe-shaped morphology and dense peripheral flagella. The presence of possible amphiblastula larva suggests that the calcareous sponges may have an extended history in the Late Precambrian. The fauna indicates that animals lived 40 to 50 million years before the Cambrian Explosion.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Li -- Chen -- Hua -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1998 Feb 6;279(5352):879-82.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉C.-W. Li and T.-E. Hua, Department of Life Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, China. J.-Y. Chen, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Academia Sinica, Nanjing, China.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9452391" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink
