Tomographic data of tubular fossils from the Ediacaran Weng'an Doushantuo biota (NERC grant NE/J018325/1)

The data are from X-ray tomographic analyses of tubular fossils. All scans were carried out using Synchrotron Radiation X-ray Tomographic Microscopy (SRXTM) except for specimen SMNH X 5324 which was also analysed using Ptychographic X-ray Computed Tomography (PXCT). The methods are described in the paper. The data consist of a stacked series of .tif files that represent maps of X-ray attenuation. The individual slices can be viewed with standard graphics software. The datasets can be studied in 3D using tomographic reconstruction software such as Avizo (www.vsg3d.com/), Spiers (www.spiers-software.org/), VG Studio Max (www.volumegraphics.com) etc. The voxel size, which is needed for scale calculations, varies between datasets and is given below. Some datasets consist of two 'blocks' of data, with slices named [specimen name]_B1 and [specimen name]_B2. These are placed in the same folder and follow on directly from one another. They can be opened together as a single dataset. The files relate to the following publication: Cunningham, J. A., Vargas, K., Liu, P., Belivanova, V., Marone, F., Martinez-Perez, C., Guizar-Sicairos, M., Holler, M., Bengtson, S. & Donoghue, P. C. J. 2015. Critical appraisal of tubular putative eumetazoans from the Ediacaran Weng'an Doushantuo biota. Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B: Biological Sciences.