#RealLifeSizeChart

[dragonthunders01]

Life history giants: Precambrian

Well as people noticed I'm a fan of scale up creatures and organisms of different species (either ficticious or real) and from a while I had thought on working in size charts for prehistoric fauna, but focused or better say dedicated to the big of the big, specifically for the longest/heaviest/biggest known specimens species known for each clade or for each period, I tried once a few years ago but my first attempts were very poor due to use very superficial information and focusing too much into irrelevant or outdated information, eventually I have had to learn that to get the right information or accurate data I have to inquire deeply which took time, but I think its always worth the effort... so now I've started this other chart project, this time going though time period to time period  to explore all the possible biggest megafauna organisms known...

This chart here contains the biggest faunistic organisms of the end of the Precambrian, during the Ediacaran period, we could say these are the first pluricellular titans from earth history, pretty even though these arent as big as anything today, these stood out among the other bizarre but tiny soft fractalic lifeforms. 

Dickinsonia is a genus formed for different species which the most common is D. costata (a) which vary in size coming from smaller individuals of few centimeters to the largest that come close to 20 cm long, but the largest specimens comes from D. rex, reaching up some size around 30 to 40 cm long (b), even though from some papers as well sporadic mentions on many other places of fragmentary specimens able to reach almost 70-80 cm (c) to even 1 meter long (d)

A little note is that the first chart has a scaled up version of the 40 cm long specimen as I was unable to find sources of the biggest one, eventually I came across with that massive specimen

The longest sessile lifeform is Charnia, the frond-like slendy creature that was planted on the seabed, even though most specimens range from size of less than 20 cm tall (a) there are large and fairly well preserved specimens of individuals of impressive size, these coming from Drook Formation, on the Avalon peninsula, Newfoundland. One of the largest specimen mentioned, ROM 54348 (b), scaled up with other more complete and large individual gives a max size of 1.85 m tall (if you tell me these are the precambrian swords)

References:

Retallack, G. J. (2007). Growth, decay and burial compaction of Dickinsonia, an iconic Ediacaran fossil. Alcheringa, 31(3), 215-240.

Lipps, J. H., & Signor, P. W. (Eds.). (2013). Origin and early evolution of the Metazoa (Vol. 10). Springer Science & Business Media.

Narbonne, G. M., & Gehling, J. G. (2003). Life after snowball: The oldest complex Ediacaran fossils. Geology, 31(1), 27-30.