A team of researchers from different institutions in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, coordinated by Imran A. Rahman, an expert in Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, has discovered that enigmatic organisms with a hemispherical and Trirachial symmetry known as Tribrachidium heraldicum , which inhabited the Ediacaran seas between 600 and 542 million years ago, were able to feed on nutrients suspended in water , something that had never been observed among the fauna of that time.
The Tribrachidium measured between 3 millimeters and 5 centimeters and had prominences around the three segments that formed their anatomy that could have been used to process food. Although it was thought that they fed by osmotrophy – an osmotic absorption mechanism – a detailed study using computational fluid dynamics by Rahman and his collaborators has revealed that, in fact, they did so passively, thanks to their peculiar morphological configuration. that led the water flows towards tiny structures that surrounded each of its arms , through which they captured the nutritive substances.
According to these experts, this behavior shows that among the Ediacaran biota there were different ways of obtaining food, which indicates that the ecosystems of that time, when the oldest known macroscopic multicellular organisms emerged, many of which do not seem related to the modern fauna, were more complex than hitherto believed.
