EDIACARAN INSIGHTS FROM COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS

Over 3.7 billion years of Earth history, life has evolved complex adaptations to help navigate and interact with the fluid environment. Consequently, fluid dynamics has become a powerful tool for studying ancient fossils, providing insights into the paleobiology and -ecology of extinct organisms from across the tree of life. In recent years, this approach has been extended to the Ediacara biota, an enigmatic assemblage of Neoproterozoic soft-bodied organisms that represent the first major radiation of macroscopic eukaryotes. Reconstructing the ways in which Ediacaran organisms interacted with the fluids provides new insights into how these organisms fed, moved, and interacted within communities. Here, we provide an in-depth review of fluid physics aimed at paleobiologists, and then provide a worked example and account of best practice in CFD analyses of fossils, including the first large eddy simulations (LES) performed on extinct organisms. Lastly, we demonstrate how this approach can be used to reconstruct in situ populations of organisms measure directly from outcrop.