Marywadea
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Marywadea Fossil range: Ediacaran |
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservation status | ||||||||||
|
Fossil
|
||||||||||
| Scientific classification | ||||||||||
|
||||||||||
| Binomial name | ||||||||||
| Marywadea ovata (Glaessner & Wade, 1966) |
||||||||||
| Synonyms | ||||||||||
|
Spriggina ovata |
Marywadea is a genus of Ediacaran biota shaped like an oval with a central ridge. It is a bilaterian organism as evidenced by its symmetry. The fossil has an asymmetrical first chamber of the quilt. It has transverse ridges away from the central axis that may be gonads. The head is shaped as a semicircle and is the same width as the rest of the body. The ridges number about 50. There are two oval shapes below the head.
Marywadea ovata is the only species known. It is most often interpreted as an ancestral arthropod or annelid, but as with all Ediacarian fauna this is not necessarily correct. Initially, it was described as the second species of Spriggina. The genus was established by Martin Glaessner in 1976, who named it after fellow paleontologist Mary Wade, with whom he had described the species ten years earlier.
[edit] References
- Glaessner, Martin F. (1976): A new genus of late Precambrian polychaete worms from South Australia. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia 100(3): 169-170. PDF fulltext
- Glaessner, Martin F. & Wade, Mary (1966): The Late Precambrian Fossils from Ediacara, South Australia. Palaeontology 9(4): 599-628. PDF fulltext
 |
This paleontology article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
