Avalofractus

Happy New Year readers!  Following on from my haootia quadriformis sculpture, I've been sculpting some more Ediacaran life forms.  In this case, rangeomorphs.  These were fern-like organisms that lived on the sea bed 635-542 million years ago and were obviously very successful, because there were a lot of different species.  This one is called avalofractus. 

Finished sculpture showing three avalofractus specimens.

The interesting thing about rangeomorphs is that their body shape was fractally symmetrical.  Modern animals are usually bilaterally symmetrical, though some plants have fractal growth patterns.  Rangeomorphs, however, had a central column anchored to the sea bed with a round holdfast, with branches growing out on alternate sides of the column.  Each branch grew sub branches, and so on.  Every little branch or frond was a miniature version of the whole animal.

This diagram shows the rangeomorph's fractal growth pattern.  The image comes from this paper by Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill and Simon Conway Morris.

I think this is just so cool.  I say animal but in fact there's some debate as to exactly what they were, and whether they were related to modern animals at all, or whether they evolved completely separately.  Although they looked like ferns, they weren't a kind of plant.  Plants use photosynthesis, and rangeomorphs did not.  They lived at the bottom of the sea where there's no light, and probably used their fronds to absorb nutrients directly out of the water.  

These sculptures are much larger than life size.  In reality avalofractus was only about 5cm long.

As with the haootia sculpture I used a simple colour scheme where the background is painted indigo and the avalofractus figures are a lighter indigo.  Again, this is my conjecture based on the fact that there's no fossil evidence for animals with eyes at this time, and there was no light at the bottom of the sea where these things lived anyway, so why would they be colourful?  I could be wrong.  There are deep sea creatures today that are colourful, even though they live in a world without light.  However, I like the simple blue colouring.  It gives them a somewhat ghostly look against the dark background, which is appropriate for deep-sea animals.