State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, China.
Nature. 2011 Feb 17;470(7334):390-3. doi: 10.1038/nature09810.
The deep-water Avalon biota (about 579 to 565 million years old) is often regarded as the earliest-known fossil assemblage with macroscopic and morphologically complex life forms. It has been proposed that the rise of the Avalon biota was triggered by the oxygenation of mid-Ediacaran deep oceans. Here we report a diverse assemblage of morphologically differentiated benthic macrofossils that were preserved largely in situ as carbonaceous compressions in black shales of the Ediacaran Lantian Formation (southern Anhui Province, South China). The Lantian biota, probably older than and taxonomically distinct from the Avalon biota, suggests that morphological diversification of macroscopic eukaryotes may have occurred in the early Ediacaran Period, perhaps shortly after the Marinoan glaciation, and that the redox history of Ediacaran oceans was more complex than previously thought.
深水阿瓦隆生物群（约 5.79 亿至 5.65 亿年前）通常被认为是最早具有宏观和形态复杂生命形式的化石组合。有人提出，阿瓦隆生物群的兴起是由中埃迪卡拉纪深海的氧气化引发的。在这里，我们报告了一个形态分化的底栖大型化石的多样组合，这些化石主要以碳质压缩的形式保存在华南皖南蓝田组的黑色页岩中。蓝田生物群可能比阿瓦隆生物群更早，在分类上也不同，这表明宏观真核生物的形态多样化可能发生在早埃迪卡拉纪时期，也许就在马里诺冰期之后不久，而且埃迪卡拉纪海洋的氧化还原历史比之前认为的要复杂。
