Background Phytoliths (microscopic opal silica particles produced in and between the cells of many plants) are a very resilient, often-preserved type of microfossil and today, phytolith analysis is widely used in palaeoenvironmental studies, botany, geology and archaeology. To date there has been little standardization in the way phytoliths are described and classified. Scope This paper present...

The rock record provides us with unique evidence for testing models as to when and where cellular life first appeared on Earth. Its study, however, requires caution. The biogenicity of stromatolites and 'microfossils' older than 3.0 Gyr should not be accepted without critical analysis of morphospace and context, using multiple modern techniques, plus rejection of alternative non-biological (nul...

The organic-walled microfossil Chuaria circularis [Walcott, C.D., 1899. Precambrian fossiliferous formations. Geol. Soc. Am. Bull. 10, 199–244] Vidal and Ford [Vidal, G., Ford, T.D., 1985. Microbiotas from the Late Proterozoic Chuar Group (Northern Arizona) and Uinta Mountain Group (Utah) and their chronostratigraphic implications. Precambrian Res. 28, 349–389] from the Visingsö Group in Sweden...

The hatching of cladoceran ephippia from a 15-cm long sediment core was investigated, and Ceriodaphnia quadrangula clones were isolated from different sediment layers. Bosmina microfossil data were also analyzed, and compared with the corresponding data from a Pb210 dated core, which allowed us to infer the age of the sediment layers. Using changes in Bosmina microfossil morphologies, we were, ...

Agić, H. 2015. Palaeobiology and diversification of Proterozoic-Cambrian photosynthetic eukaryotes. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology 1308. 47 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-554-9389-9. One of the most important events in the history of life is the evolution of the complex, eukaryotic cell. The eukaryote...

Organic-walled microfossils provide the best insights into the composition and evolution of the biosphere through the first 80 percent of Earth history. The mechanism of microfossil preservation affects the quality of biological information retained and informs understanding of early Earth palaeo-environments. We here show that 1 billion-year-old microfossils from the non-marine Torridon Group ...