Rangea is a frond

Frond

The term frond refers to a large, divided leaf. In both common usage and botanical nomenclature, the leaves of ferns are referred to as fronds and some botanists restrict the term to this group...

-like fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

 of the Ediacaran

Ediacaran

The Ediacaran Period , named after the Ediacara Hills of South Australia, is the last geological period of the Neoproterozoic Era and of the Proterozoic Eon, immediately preceding the Cambrian Period, the first period of the Paleozoic Era and of the Phanerozoic Eon...

 period.

The features found in Rangea are a double-layered quilted structure, a tripartite stemless body with fourfold radial symmetry, a mucous-supported sheath, smooth surface, radial membranes, and internal organs that are a system of sacs connected by a medial canal.

Rangea is relatively small in size.

There are four known species, R. arborea, R. grandis and R. longa discovered by Glaessner

Martin Glaessner

Martin Fritz Glaessner AM was a geologist and palaeontologist. Born and educated in Austro-Hungarian Empire, he spent the majority of his life in working for oil companies in Russia, and studying the geology of the South Pacific in Australia...

 & Wade

Mary Wade (Paleontologist)

Dr Mary Julia Wade was an Australian paleontologist, perhaps best known for her work on the late Precambrian Ediacaran biota in South Australia....

 in 1966, and also the original Rangea schneiderhoehoni discovered by Georg Gürich.

It is found in Namibia

Namibia

Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia , is a country in southern Africa whose western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and east. It gained independence from South Africa on 21 March...

 and Mistaken Point, Newfoundland

Newfoundland and Labrador

Newfoundland and Labrador is the easternmost province of Canada. Situated in the country's Atlantic region, it incorporates the island of Newfoundland and mainland Labrador with a combined area of . As of April 2011, the province's estimated population is 508,400...

.

Rangea seems to have lived embedded in the surface of the sediment of the sea.

Rangea has been interpreted as a pennatulacean octocoral, a sea pen

Sea pen

Sea pens are colonial marine cnidarians belonging to the order Pennatulacea. There are 14 families within the order; they are thought to have a cosmopolitan distribution in tropical and temperate waters worldwide...

, or a multinucleate

Multinucleate

Multinucleate cells have more than one nucleus per cell, which is the result of nuclear division not being followed by cytokinesis. As a consequence, multiple nuclei share one common cytoplasm. This can be the consequence of a disturbed cell cycle control Multinucleate (also multinucleated,...

 eukaryotic cell.

Similar organisms are Bomakellia with fourfold symmetry, and Thaumaptilon

Thaumaptilon

Thaumaptilon is a fossil from the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale which some authors have compared to members of the Ediacaran biota, generally believed to have disappeared at the start of the Cambrian,...

, Charnia

Charnia

Charnia is the genus name given to a frond-like Ediacaran lifeform with segmented ridges branching alternately to the right and left from a zig-zag medial suture. The genus Charnia was named after Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, England, where the first fossilised specimen was found.- Diversity...

, Charniodiscus

Charniodiscus

Charniodiscus is an Ediacaran fossil that was probably a stationary filter feeder that lived anchored to a sandy sea bed. The organism had a holdfast, stalk and frond. The holdfast was bulbous shaped, and the stalk was flexible. The frond was segmented and had a pointed tip...

, Paracharnia which are other fronds.
One classification scheme by Hans Pflug is class Rangeomorpha, family Rangeidae. An alternate scheme places it in the Petalonamae group. A generic term for these is rangeomorph

Rangeomorph

The Rangeomorphs are a form taxon of frondose Ediacaran fossils that are united by a similarity to Rangea. Some workers, e.g. Pflug and Narbonne, suggest that a natural taxon Rangeomorpha may include all similar-looking fossils....

s which display fractal

Fractal

A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity...

 branching (rather like a fern

Fern

A fern is any one of a group of about 12,000 species of plants belonging to the botanical group known as Pteridophyta. Unlike mosses, they have xylem and phloem . They have stems, leaves, and roots like other vascular plants...

).