Like their Australian relatives, the vendobionts of Mistaken Point are built like air mattresses. But instead of the serial pattern resulting from the sequential addition of new "segments" (like in annelid worms), their quilting pattern resembles the venation of plant leaves: once established, the inter-"vein" areas expand and become successively subdivided. In the terminology of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot such growth leads to "fractal" patterns (see plexiglass graphic by Gene Carrozza, New Haven in the introductory panel). The fractal mode serves the same purpose as serial subdivision: keeping the absolute size of the quiltings steady during growth of the organism. The presence of similar allometric compartmentalization in oversized unicellular organisms (e.g. large foraminifera) suggests that the living content of the vendobionts was syncytial, i.e. they had multiple nuclei, but were not truly multicellular.

                      Important information about the life style of the Newfoundland vendobionts can once again be derived from preservational circumstances. In the top slab (# 12), all stalked forms are oriented alike. We know the direction of the smothering turbidity current (arrow) from cross-bedding observed by Friedrich Pflüger in the overlying ash bed. Thus the alignment is equivalent to tree felling patterns after a storm: like trees, the organisms were attached to the bottom and held the fronds up into the water column, rather than being suspended from a buoyant "life saver". The erect life style, however, poses another problem. Firstly, the holdfast disks (circular when retrodeformed) never became uprooted. Aso, disks would be rather ill designed for attachment to loose sediment. This contradiction is solved by assuming that the sediment surface was sealed by a leathery microbial mat. On such a substrate, holdfast disks could function just as they do on a rock.

                      Other vendobiont species on the same bedding plane must have also been adhesively attached to the mat, because their long axes remained randomly oriented in spite of the turbidity current, in which any loose objects would have been transported and aligned before they became buried. A few of these carpet organisms became partly flipped over. They prove that both sides were identical, like those of a quilted mattress.