Susannah Porter on Tiny Vampires in Ancient Seas

Geology Bites

The fossil record of complex life goes back far beyond the Cambrian explosion, to as far back as 1,600 million years ago in the late Paleoproterozoic with the first appearance of eukaryotes. But these creatures only started to diversify much later, around 750 million years ago. What enabled this evolutionary change has been a puzzle, but one idea is that it reflects the appearance of microscopic predators. In the podcast, Susannah Porter tells us how she discovered incontrovertible signs of predation in vase-shaped microfossils dating from this period.

Susannah Porter is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies microfossils of eukaryotic life forms that lived in the Neoproterozoic, about 750 million years ago.

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