Cambrian Explosion: role of oxygen (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 18:50 (3202 days ago) @ David Turell

Another review of the oxygen issue:-http://www.nature.com/news/what-sparked-the-cambrian-explosion-1.19379?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160218&spMailingID=50720412&spUserID=MjA1NjE2NDU5MwS2&spJobID=862152809&spReportId=ODYyMTUyODA5S0-"Some scientists now think that a small, perhaps temporary, increase in oxygen suddenly crossed an ecological threshold, enabling the emergence of predators. The rise of carnivory would have set off an evolutionary arms race that led to the burst of complex body types and behaviours that fill the oceans today. “This is the most significant event in Earth evolution,” says Guy Narbonne, a palaeobiologist at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. “The advent of pervasive carnivory, made possible by oxygenation, is likely to have been a major trigger.”-"In the modern world, it's easy to forget that complex animals are relative newcomers to Earth. Since life first emerged more than 3 billion years ago, single-celled organisms have dominated the planet for most of its history. Thriving in environments that lacked oxygen, they relied on compounds such as carbon dioxide, sulfur-containing molecules or iron minerals that act as oxidizing agents to break down food. Much of Earth's microbial biosphere still survives on these anaerobic pathways.-"Animals, however, depend on oxygen — a much richer way to make a living. The process of metabolizing food in the presence of oxygen releases much more energy than most anaerobic pathways. Animals rely on this potent, controlled combustion to drive such energy-hungry innovations as muscles, nervous systems and the tools of defence and carnivory — mineralized shells, exoskeletons and teeth.-***-"In Namibia, China and other spots around the world, researchers have collected rocks that were once ancient seabeds, and analysed the amounts of iron, molybdenum and other metals in them. The metals' solubility depends strongly on the amount of oxygen present, so the amount and type of those metals in ancient sedimentary rocks reflect how much oxygen was in the water long ago, when the sediments formed.-"These proxies seemed to indicate that oxygen concentrations in the oceans rose in several steps, approaching today's sea-surface concentrations at the start of the Cambrian, around 541 million years ago — just before more-modern animals suddenly appeared and diversified. This supported the idea of oxygen as a key trigger for the evolutionary explosion.-"But last year, a major study1 of ancient sea-floor sediments challenged that view. Erik Sperling, a palaeontologist at Stanford University in California, compiled a database of 4,700 iron measurements taken from rocks around the world, spanning the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. He and his colleagues did not find a statistically significant increase in the proportion of oxic to anoxic water at the boundary between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian.-“'Any oxygenation event must have been far, far smaller than what people normally considered,” concludes Sperling. Most people assume “that the oxygenation event essentially raised oxygen to essentially modern-day levels. And that probably wasn't the case”, he says.-***-"The role of oxygen in the origins of animals has been heavily debated,” says Timothy Lyons, a geobiologist at the University of California, Riverside. “In fact, it's never been more debated than it is now.” Lyons sees a role for oxygen in evolutionary changes, but his own work3 with molybdenum and other trace metals suggests that the increases in oxygen just before the Cambrian were mostly temporary peaks that lasted a few million years and gradually stepped upward."-Comment: The major thought is still oxygen, but no theory as to why all the sudden complexity.