Trepassia
Trepassia is a 579-million-year-old fossil of Ediacaran rangeomorph. It was first discovered by Guy M. Narbonne, a professor at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada and colleagues in 2009. Three years later, Martin D. Brasier added additional description to Trepassia. The generic name is taken from the French word, trépassés, which translates to "those that have departed forever" and honors the Trepassey community in Newfoundland. It was originally described as Charnia wardi.

Peter Trusler · CC0 · 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
- RangeomorphaPBDB
- Diet
- osmotrophPBDB
- Life habit
- upper-level epifaunalPBDB
- Motility
- stationary, attachedPBDB
- Environment
- outer shelf,marinePBDB
Time the record covers
At most 97 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 635 Mya and 538.8 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
9 occurrences of Trepassia 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
9 occurrencesThese 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
5 formations
- Drook Formation · Conception Group4
- Mistaken Point Formation · Conception Group2
- Trepassey Formation · St. John's Group1
- Briscal Formation · Conception Group1
- Fermeuse Formation1
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The named rock units Trepassia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Found in the same rock
32 taxa- Charnia masoni7 sites
- Aspidella3 sites
- Beothukis mistakensis3 sites
- Charniodiscus3 sites
- Fractofusus andersoni3 sites
- Thectardis avalonensis3 sites
- Arborea spinosa2 sites
- Charnia2 sites
- Charniodiscus procerus2 sites
- Ivesheadiomorpha indet.2 sites
- Primocandelabrum2 sites
- Aninoides1 site
- Arborea arborea1 site
- Avalofractus abaculus1 site
- Beothukis1 site
- Bradgatia1 site
- Bradgatia linfordensis1 site
- Broccoliforma1 site
- Charnia gracilis1 site
- Culmofrons plumosa1 site
- Frondophyllas1 site
- Hadrynichorde1 site
- Hadryniscala avalonica1 site
- Hiemalora pleiomorpha1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 8 sites for Trepassia, 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
5 references- A Chronostratigraphic Framework for the Rise of the Ediacaran Macrobiota: New Constraints from Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland3
- Reconstructing a lost world: Ediacaran rangeomorphs from Spaniard’s Bay, Newfoundland2
- Life after snowball: The oldest complex Ediacaran fossils2
- Ediacaran endlings from the Avalon Assemblage and the severity of the Kotlin Crisis: First documentation of the Inner Meadow Lagerstätte, Newfoundland, Canada1
- Morphology and taphonomy of an Ediacaran frond: Charnia from the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland1
Each of the 9 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 Trepassia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Peter Trusler
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Trepassia 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Trepassia”
- 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 itRangeomorpha through time
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Narbonne et al. 2009