The Ecological Physiology of Earth's Second Oxygen Revolution

Abstract

Living animals display a variety of morphological, physiological, and biochemical characters that enable them to live in low-oxygen environments. These features and the organisms that have evolved them are distributed in a regular pattern across dioxygen (O2) gradients associated with modern oxygen minimum zones. This distribution provides a template for interpreting the stratigraphic covariance between inferred Ediacaran-Cambrian oxygenation and early animal diversification. Although Cambrian oxygen must have reached 10-20% of modern levels, sufficient to support the animal diversity recorded by fossils, it may not have been much higher than this. Today's levels may have been approached only later in the Paleozoic Era. Nonetheless, Ediacaran-Cambrian oxygenation may have pushed surface environments across the low, but critical, physiological thresholds required for large, active animals, especially carnivores. Continued focus on the quantification of the partial pressure of oxygen (pO2) in the Proterozoic will provide the definitive tests of oxygen-based coevolutionary hypotheses.