Tawuia

Tawuia is a millimetric disc or sausage-shaped, most likely multicellular, macrofossil from the Proterozoic. Stratigraphically, they range from around 1,630 million years ago to the early Cambrian.

Tawuia

Tourmaline Ctenacanth · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.

On record

Recorded, not inferred
Sits inside
ChuariaceaePBDB
Diet
"photoautotroph"PBDB, for Chlorophyta
Life habit
epifaunalPBDB, for Chlorophyta
Motility
stationary, attachedPBDB, for Chlorophyta
Environment
lagoonal,coastal,inner shelf,marine,brackish,freshwaterPBDB, for Chlorophyta

Time the record covers

At least 965 million years on record.

The record covers at least 1600 Mya to 635 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 1800 Mya to 538.8 Mya.

Cambrian — about 0 of 21 occurrences1825–1782 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences1782–1738 Mya — about 2 occurrences1738–1694 Mya — about 2 occurrences1694–1650 Mya — about 2 occurrences1650–1607 Mya — about 2 occurrences1607–1563 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences1038–995 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences995–951 Mya — about 1 occurrence951–907 Mya — about 1 occurrence907–863 Mya — about 1 occurrence863–820 Mya — about 1 occurrence820–776 Mya — about 1 occurrence776–732 Mya — about 1 occurrence732–688 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences688–645 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences645–601 Mya — about 2 occurrences601–557 Mya — about 3 occurrences557–514 Mya — about 1 occurrence1600 Mya635 Mya1825 Mya514 Mya

21 occurrences of Tawuia on record. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.

When

21 occurrences

These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.

Found in

7 formations

Chuanlinggou — 40.60°N, 118.53°EChuanlinggou — 40.47°N, 118.36°ELiulaobei — 32.57°N, 116.77°ELiulaobei — 32.63°N, 116.98°EStone Knife — 64.97°N, 130.60°WStone Knife — 64.80°N, 129.78°WStone Knife — 64.78°N, 129.67°WStone Knife — 64.62°N, 128.68°WJiuliqiao — 32.57°N, 116.77°EJiuliqiao — 32.96°N, 117.19°EJiuliqiao — 32.63°N, 116.98°EDengying — 24.47°N, 102.77°ERaiga — 59.40°N, 85.67°EWeiji — 34.00°N, 116.83°E

Loading coastlines…

The named rock units Tawuia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.

Found in the same rock

30 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 16 sites for Tawuia, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.

This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.

Entered from

6 references

Each of the 21 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.

Media and terms

Media content1

Picture of Tawuia

Credit
Tourmaline Ctenacanth
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Tawuia was found in Sketchfab.

Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.

The description on this site

Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0

This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.

Keep going

What may have been alongside itChuariaceae through time

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Hofmann 1979