Similar to the Cambrian explosion of animal life, it appears there was an earlier similar explosion for plants, at least the Ediacaran variety.
In what the ScienceNOW Daily News is calling Another Big Bang for Biology, the oldest assemblage of macroscopic life forms on earth, Ediacaran plants, appeared suddenly and fully diversified.
This plant life “explosion” coincides exactly with a sudden rise in ocean oxygenation.
The study authors, paleontologists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, call their findings The Avalon Explosion.
The ScienceNOW article starts with the admission that
Researchers have uncovered what they think is a sudden diversification of life at least 30 million years before the Cambrian period, the time when most of the major living groups of animals emerged. If confirmed, the find reinforces the idea that major evolutionary innovations occurred in bursts.
Which, like the Cambrian explosion of animals, starkly contradicts standard Darwinian Dogma, and puts quite a strain on Punctuated Equlibria. Which is why the author feels the need to immediately reassure his readers that
The main points of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he carefully laid out in The Origin of Species 149 years ago, have stood the test of time.
Nevertheless, this is one more major scientific finding to contradict the orthodox neo-Darwinian evolutionary scenario.
(Acknowledgment to Brig Klyce)