Canadian Rocks Reveal New Details of (Possible) Fossils of the (Possible) Earliest Life on Earth
ElizabethGreene writes:
Scientists believe they have identified the oldest fossils on Earth, dating back at least 3.75 billion years and possibly even 4.2 billion years, in rocks found at a remote location in northern Quebec, Canada, according to a new study.
If the structures in these rocks are biological in origin, it would push the timeline of life on our planet back by 300 million years at a minimum, and could potentially show that the earliest known organisms are barely younger than Earth itself.
These presumed microbial fossils were originally collected by Dominic Papineau, an associate professor in geochemistry and astrobiology at University College London, during a 2008 expedition to Quebec's Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, a formation that contains some of the oldest rocks on Earth. Papineau and his colleagues reported their discovery in a 2017 paper published in Nature, which sparked a debate over whether the tubes and filaments preserved in the rocks were a result of biological or geological processes.
[...] In the wake of skepticism about the claims of their 2017 study, Papineau and his colleagues employed a host of new techniques to clarify the nature of the mysterious structures in the Canadian rock.
[...] "We don't have any DNA, of course, that survived these geological timescales, with the heat and pressure that the rock has suffered," Papineau said. "But what we can say, on the basis of morphology, is that these microfossils resemble those that are made by the modern microbacterium called Mariprofundus ferrooxydans."
Journal Reference:
Dominic Papineau, Zhenbing She, Matthew S. Dodd, et al., Metabolically diverse primordial microbial communities in Earth's oldest seafloor-hydrothermal jasper [open], Sci. Adv., 8, 15, 2022.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2296
Previously: Oldest Evidence of Life on Earth Found in 3.77-4.28 Billion Year Old Fossils
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