Ediacaran fossil localities

Ediacaran fossils have been reported from many different localities around the world. These range from remote regions such as northwestern Canada and Arctic Siberia, to sites in the heart of civilization such as the city centre of St. John's, Newfoundland. The localities each offer unique perspectives of life in the Ediacaran Period, recording taxa and depositional environments at a variety of palaeolatitudes spanning an interval of around 40 million years.

Key Ediacaran fossil localities around the globe.

Ediacaran macrofossils have been reported from over 100 global locations (see McCall, 2006 for an introductory overview of many of them), but several of these reports represent questionable specimens that have been over-interpreted or incorrectly assigned to the Ediacaran.

Critical evaluation of these fossil sites leaves around 40-50 global localities from which convincing Ediacara-type macrofossils have been described (e.g. Fedonkin et al., 2007). Some of the most important sites for palaeontological research can be explored via the tabs above.

Relationships between the localities
Similarities in the composition of certain Ediacaran fossil assemblages have long been recognized (e.g. Waggoner, 2003), and efforts are continuing to determine whether these reflect ecological, spatial, temporal or evolutionary signals (Grazhdankin, 2014; Boag et al., 2016). Some of these similarities can be explained by localities possessing a similar age or palaeogeographic position during the Ediacaran Period (e.g. the Newfoundland and U.K. sites, which lay roughly next to one-another offshore of the microcontinent of Avalonia during the late Ediacaran and early Cambrian; Cocks et al., 1997; Wilby et al., 2011).

However, there do also appear to be clear facies (i.e. depositional environment) controls on taxonomic assemblages at several locations, with specific depositional environments appearing to possess distinct fossil taxa (Grazhdankin, 2004; Gehling & Droser, 2013). Much work remains to be done to obtain accurate radiometric dates and palaeogeographic positions from many of the localities, and to study their sedimentology in detail, before we can be certain about how the global sites relate to one-another in space and time.

Ediacaran deep-marine strata in a heavily vegetated quarry, Charnwood Forest, U.K.