Elevated Marine Dissolved Silica Levels Explain a Wide Range of Ediacaran–Cambrian Ediacara-Style Fossil Deposits

Abstract

The processes responsible for the fossilization of the Ediacara Biota—Earth's earliest fossil record of communities of complex, multicellular organisms—have long been debated. On the basis of both geologic and experimental investigations, recent studies have proposed that early diagenetic silica cementation may have been pivotal to the moldic preservation in sandstone (“Ediacara-style preservation”) of fossil assemblages from the eponymous Ediacara Member of South Australia. However, the extent to which early silica cementation can explain other instances of Ediacara-style fossilization in units recording disparate depositional environments, paleogeographies, and geologic ages has not been p..