Издатель: ИЦ НГАУ "Золотой колос" , Место издания: Новосибирск , Год издания: 2019

The work is dedicated to study the nature of the interaction between early metazoan organisms and broad-scale environment during the Ediacaran period (580-538 Ma). To investigate how broad-scale environment influences community ecology of early animal ecosystems we used spatial point process analyses. This study is focused on in-situ palaecommunities from various localities with different environmental settings. Deep-water communities were not influenced by local habitat heterogeneities as opposed to shallow-marine organisms. There has been a decrease of species diversity from shallow-marine associations to deep-marine Ediacaran palaecommunities that could have been driven by environmental patchiness, because habitat heterogeneities correspond to higher diversity in modern marine environments and we suggest that early diversification of metazoans was a benthic event, driven by responses to habitat patchiness.