What the Hell was Dickinsonia?! 

My question is who is Sonia? 🤨

It hurts my heart whenever a fossil gets destroyed, even if it's for science.

Ah yes, Our greatest ancestor was a disk

"what the hell was dickinsonia" the peak of life on earth thats what it was. we should've never evolved past that

The sterol study did compare the on-specimen versus nearby matrix measures and did find contrast

Crawling around on the sea floor absorbing nutrients from bacterial mats directly through a permeable membrane was probably a fairly efficient feeding strategy, that is until the Bacteria did a bit of mutating and found It now had an excellent food source in Dickinsonia. There's always some Joker wanting to breakup the good times.

I hardly knew her

Ediacaran creatures are so fascinating, particularly because this was a time before the tree of life was pruned down, so there are body plans and lifestyles we wouldn't even recognize today! Fascinating video and research!

I, just the other day, got a fossil called Andiva. At first, scientists thought that it was just a large form of Dickinsonia. However, now they think that it is a related, slightly more evolved species. Great video on one of the first (likely) animals!

In Mycology, we were told that part of the definition of "fungi" was that they were all sessile. The motion of Dickinsonia would therefore rule out it being a fungus.

The head-first development is _really_ panarthropod-like, which is the most unusually part for me. so many weirdos in groups like crustaceans are essentially born as heads that grow their body out behind them as their metamorphosis. And looking at Tardigrades, they have basically reduced themselves down to being just a head for their whole life. Not saying these were panarthropods or even especially related to then, but it's a pretty weird parallel to notice.

The possibility that's most intriguing to me is that Dickinsonia and other Ediacaran specimens represent stem-metazoans, that is to say, animals from a line that diverged at some point before the most recent common ancestor of all living animal species.

Evolution doesn't make perfect, it makes good enough... man, what a weirdly inspirational thought. Thank you, and thanks Dickinsonia

Immediate spectulation. They got the head and tail mixed up. The head is actually the other end. This creature would grow by developing a biased division in the wide segment at the back, and that process alternated from left to right. It had a growth pattern similar to a modern tapeworm, and as it grew larger the new segments grew larger. It used suction to hold it to the sea flood in the intertidal zone, where the photosynthetic mats it would feed upon were the most plentiful. The niche it occupied is now exploited by the sand dollar.

I think that bilateral animals could have evolved when a flat, 2 layer animal like Placozoa rolled into a tube. The Placozoa top layer became the ectoderm and the Placozoa bottom (food absorbing layer) became the endoderm, or gut tube.

Nature really did like to experiment, didn't it? Not content with just picking a kind of symmetry and trying out body plans from it, it actually experimented with different body symmetries to start with! One has to wonder what life would have been like if trilateral radial had taken off, though...

I don't know why it is so hard to believe that bilaterians evolved from creatures like Dickinsonia. Charnia to Dickinsonia to Spriggina to something like a Trilobite or annelid worm convinces me quite a lot. Maybe the glide symmetry turned into bilateral symmetry?

I'm a big fan of Dickinsonia...

Aloha. Dickinsonia Was 100% an animal. There are protein Fragmentes in that rocks that are proof of it. Was hard to extract and analyse but worked out well. Only true animals have that protein. ❤

One of your best videos yet ! Keep up the good work !! The ediacran organisms are wonderful !!

Thanks for sharing! The Ediacaran is one of the most interesting to me. Everything looked so alien. I imagine that life in Europa's ocean would be similar.The part about the cholesterol is new to me and i havent heard anyone else discuss this. Thanks!

Only tangentially related, but I love how the sandy background of the art in the thumbnail makes that specific dickinsonia look city-sized at thumbnail resolution. lol

How do you think Dickinsonia moved? Was it more of a crawl (scrunch and stretch), a slither (alternately tensing its segments back and forth), or a flappy motion (as it lifted itself off the bottom a bit)? Could they have been able to glide in the water?

They really couldnt give it a better name? It's 2 letters away from being very cursed

Johnny Cage's favorite fossil

We have some lovely Ediacaran fossil sites in Australia at the Flinders Ranges, went there for a geology field trip and got to meet one of the paleontologists who was working on one of the sites! SO many Dickinsonia at that site along with a bunch of Spriggina and you could see the ripples in the sand! (Also we pronounce it Edi-ac-aran here in Australia, I almost didn't understand what word you were saying from how you pronounced it XD)

Nature’s first Roomba

Bro, whoever has their Dickinsonia has been rock hard for hundreds of millions of years 💀

in plant biology, one identifying factor is the node arrangement on the stem. There are several more than i mention, but two very common ones are "opposite" vs "alternate". This life form appears to have the alternate form like hollies, camelias and oaks. Some examples of the opposite would be maples, boxwoods, ligustrums, tea olive and crape myrtles. Maybe this alternate form of growth could give us a clue?

thank you sonia.... i never will get this out of my head.

Don't make the joke ! don't make the joke ! don't make the joke !

Dickinsonia?! I barely knew her!

Thank you for this interesting take on the enigmatic Dickinsonia, and indeed Spriggina! I look on their 'pesudo-bilateralism' and have long thought "I bet these aren't animals, at least not in the sense one would commonly understand." I also find it hard to believe their seeming 'alternating segments' are a taphonomic artefact. What, every example? What hadn't occurred to me is that they may be showing a step along the way to becoming truly bilateral, something to think about.

An alga is just a photosyntetic organism in water. It is not a clade. Claiming that kelp is algae, essentially says nothing. They are brown algae, which is the clade Phaeophyceae. And land plants are algae too, namely Green Algae, that belong to the new clade Plantae. Some "algae" are plants, some aren't, so one cannot distinguish plants from "algae" like mutually exclusive groupings.

Hits different when you're a pokemon fan

Did he ask Sonia for consent first tho?

It has the best name ever ! ...right after *amorphus globosus*

first read the thumbnail as “Dickensona” like a sona from Charles Dickens. but learning about animals with radial and glide symmetry is so woah!

I don't pretend to know the answer to what Dickinsonia is, but it does look like a transition from some kind of placozoan/radial animal toward bilaterals.

Maybe I missed it, but I don't think you ever defined 'glide symmetry'. Helpful for those of us who aren't Paleontologists.

very cool. also, kelp is not a plant, just a big algae?!? i was today years old when i learned this

A joke to make my aunt in law laugh her ass off.

I’ve got to defend the researcher who theorized they were lichen a tad (he’s my dads friend, I have to lol). Lichen, theoretically at least, doesn’t have to live on land. Lichen isn’t a particular type of life after all, it’s a group I’d symbionts from vastly different kingdoms. Lichen may look like a primitive plant but they are not. Lichen are made up of at least one type of algae, fungus, and yeast, but often they have multiple species of each. All three, fungus, algae, and yeast, can live in water which theoretically means there could be a type of ocean dwelling lichen. I haven’t talked to Greg Rucka about it so I don’t know if that was his argument, but that seems somewhat plausible to me. Personally I think he’s wrong here, I think it’s far more likely they are animals, but if you don’t challenge theories and present new hypothesis then science can’t move forward.

Personally, I wonder if Ediacaran life is even related to modern life in any way. It might have been sort of an alpha test for complex life (if we think of the Cambrian as the beta, ala TierZoo), with nearly all of those organisms proving unsuccessful and dying out.

It was Sonia's special evening.

could it possibly be that it evolved from a bilateral animal then stopped being bilateral? that could explain why it's so unusual. maybe its ancestor had a bunch of symmetrical segments but then its body flattened and every second segment after the head grew laterally in a different direction to the previous

I don’t know a ton about dickinsonia but is it possible it could be a sea pen relative that freely floated because they have been found near or next to crinoid fossils

I still think of Dickinsonia as a meme when I see or hear the word, like updog or ligma.

I don’t know, but Sonia is always really happy about it.

Ah, yes, Dickinsonia, Penispersona, Phallusfamiliarus, how could I forget?

Sorry, but I think the internet has broken me, my first thought seeing this video title was "What the Hell was Dickinsonia?!"... "Dickinsonia face.. . gottem"

I cannot believe they named it that

The title is self explanatory

Bonus question: What the Dickens is Hellinsonia?

"no animal is perfect" UHHHH the Horseshoe Crab??? Flawless being. 445 million years of non-evolution. Gods perfect creation.

What in what?

I've never even considered a beehive to be simple...

me and who?

There's the half-brother of Dickinsideya

"Dickensonia" is the people who watch Patrick Dickenson's "wild camp" videos.

Just my opinion: No organism is radially symmetrical. Anything described that way can be bisected into two equal halves, once one knows where its seam starts. Starfish start out obviously bilateral, then merely appear radially symmetrical, while one arm contains the genitals, thus, cut in half through that arm, they are still bilateral. Flowers that appear radially symmetrical come from stems that are not, from seeds that are not. Follow their growth from the start, and you can bisect odd-petaled flowers perfectly. All that said, this creature, made to give delicate pedicures, is obviously a bilateral animal, as the impressions left behind would not have been done by a plant, nor do fungi typically move (and this is obviously not a slime mold). It would be cool if it ends up being one of our ancestors, but I am betting more it's not going to lead to deuterostomes. It looks like a bug. BTW, as an uncle many times over, let me just say, the eye roll thing you do unconsciously, for emphasis of ideas? It's adorable, and works well. So few people do this. I am sure that means something. Oy, if someone was of an age, single and looking... (Then, as I was leaving, subbing, I saw your link for Gaza aid... Who would not adore you?)

Dickinsonia was the bottom of the tribrachidium -- line up the holes.

it's the tully monster's rug

This was very hard to watch as someone named Sonia!

Dickinsonia has bilateral symmetry, you merely need to look at it from its side.

Dickinsonia? I barely know her!

I've gotta' admit it: when I read the title, the first response in my mind was, "It's how Sonia got pregnant."

you are the first person to say cambrian explosion without singing it in over a decade. congratulations

Silly question. Trilobite. All life was Trilobite. Soon, all will be Trilobite again.

Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much, and the woman happens to be named Sonia...

Nice video. I recommend including source links for the technical works being discussed, so viewers can more easily do their own follow-ups (I do that in the link sections for my Evolution Hour stuff. In this case the obvious one would be: Bobrovskiy, Ilya, Janet M. Hope, Andrey Ivantsov, Benjamin J. Nettersheim, Christian Hallmann, & Jochen J. Brocks. 2018. “Ancient steroids establish the Ediacaran fossil Dickinsonia as one of the earliest animals.” Science 361 (21 September): 1246-1249.

“What the hell was dickinsonia?” A roomba. A flippin roomba

thought this was about Dicksonia for a moment and was confused

Sounds like Sonia is living her best life

Pre earthworm that lived before there was soil to munch on

YOU DID WHAT TO SONIA!!?

I suggest you ask Sonia, but she will probably tell you that it's none of your business.

Seen the title, googled it, and saved time by getting my answer without watching this video. And because I paused the piece when the ad’s were loading, you will not get the view point. Have a great day, thanks for teaching me something without teaching!

Dick-in-Sonia may be found down at the local quality lager-purveyance establishment. Corner chair.

Going back this far in the fossil record and evolutionary tree, this becomes extremely speculative.

Absolutely, great video. Subscribed. As a performer, I also don’t give a shit what my hair looks like often, and I have gotten into hats as a tool for lookin a bit better.

what time was this thing around?

I love this era of time ❤ more please

What was dickinsonia? Bring me sonia and I'll show ya!

Aluminum would be a poor choice for skeletons. How to repair it when damaged? Are there aluminum-based metabolisms? There is a snail with iron based shell. If Iron worked better, we'd have iron bones. Calcium skeletons are lightweight, slightly flexible, have good strength, and are easily repaired. They also act as storage for calcium for metabolism. A calcium skeleton allows for buoyancy in water. A heavy skeleton would require a lot of energy to be expended for locomotion.

Oh yeah, Dickinsonia. That was me when I had my first time.

it reminds of a smart saying" in enviroment of controlled humidity, temperature and nutrition, every life form dose whatever the hell it wants". That is how evolution realy works i think, lots of random trail and failures untill something gives enough of an edge to someone and than we get massive extinction because oxygen came in to the world and noone was ready. (or other much less devastating events)

I hope someone bought Sonia dinner first

I think using aluminium bones as an example of evolution being imperfect is quite misleading. Our bones structure as it exists IS perfect, at least in respect to the driving force of evolution which is improving organisms' fitness for it's environment. It also ignores many other considerations in an organic structural frame, e.g. soft tissue must attach to it in some form.

Well, some humans have a gilde symmetry regarding the abs.

i truly thought from the thumbnail that i was going to be diving into some fictional rpg monster creature. still, was not dissapointed

"Most people think algae is monocellular" Really? When I think algae, my first tought is big seaweed like kelp XD

The prehistoric frisby

its a br0n movie, starring Sonia Blaze and the mandingo brothers title, 'DickinSonia, lost in the museum' a small best seller from the 2000s a classic. Look it up

The symmetry thing is stupid. Many modern turtle shells segments don't line up for one, and secondly, if evolution is correct, there was a time when symmetry had to begin. At _some_ point, symmetry was a new, developing trait. Why couldn't this be a transitional phase? But yeah, the fact that modem turtle segments are sometimes nonsymmetrical debunks the entire concept of that being overly significant.

Unfortunate name for a fossil. There is no way they didn’t immediately notice the potential sex joke.

Chicks named Sonia: 🥵😮‍💨

who makes these names?

great video but you gotta work on those outros bro maybe add like 15 seconds of outro music with source data or attributions the video just ended so suddenly I was like " oh thats it?" it made sense to end there don't get me wrong but it was still surprising

I just came here to say i first read the thumbnail as dicksona. Prepare for the internet to make this a real thing sooner than you think.