Sedimentology and Palaeoecology of Ernietta-Bearing Ediacaran Deposits in Southern Namibia: Implications for Infaunal Vendobiont Communities

Abstract

The Ediacaran was a period of wide soft-bodied biota development in marine siliciclastic environment. The reconstruction of palaeoecology, lifestyle and environment settings of these organisms are among the challenges in characterising the earliest metazoan life on Earth. The biota colonised sea bottoms and were living as benthic communities occurring in a wide spectrum of environmental settings (e.g. Gehling 2000; Waggoner 2003; Narbonne 2005; Grazhdankin 2004; Droser et al. 2006). In the classical localities (e.g. Newfoundland, Namibia, White Sea and Australia), the fossils occur in rock successions with distinct depositional settings ranging from distributary mouth-bar of braid-delta systems to deep-water slope (Gehling 2000; Grazhdankin 2004; Narbonne 2005).