Ediacaran
adj, name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An organism that lived in the Ediacaran period.
"Many Ediacarans seem to have lived quiet lives of very limited mobility on the bottom of the sea."
- 1 Of a geologic period within the Neoproterozoic era from about 620 to 542 million years ago. not-comparable
"The widespread discoveries of fossil remains of Ediacaran aspect have generated continued excitement in respect of their possible evolutionary significance, and in terms of recent surrealistic interpretations of their morphology and inferred interrelationships (Pflug, 1970a,b, 1972a,b; Fedonkin, 1985 a,b; Gould, 1984, 1985; Seilacher, 1984, 1985, 1989; McMenamin, 1986; and Bergstrom, 1989, 1990), a reexamination of the actual fossil material is timely."
- 1 The Ediacaran period.
"Recently, in 2004, a new geological period, the Ediacaran, was formally added to the time scale. It immediately precedes the Cambrian period, and therefore lies within the Proterozoic."
Example
More examples"The widespread discoveries of fossil remains of Ediacaran aspect have generated continued excitement in respect of their possible evolutionary significance, and in terms of recent surrealistic interpretations of their morphology and inferred interrelationships (Pflug, 1970a,b, 1972a,b; Fedonkin, 1985 a,b; Gould, 1984, 1985; Seilacher, 1984, 1985, 1989; McMenamin, 1986; and Bergstrom, 1989, 1990), a reexamination of the actual fossil material is timely."
Etymology
From Ediacara + -an. After the Ediacara Hills in South Australia; from an Australian Aboriginal term (details disputed). See Ediacara Hills on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.