Billion-year-old rocks have revealed traces of ancient life 'hidden in plain sight'
Plants, algae, fungi, and animals — including humans — are all eukaryotes: life forms with complex, nucleus-containing cells. A recent discovery of organic compounds in ancient rocks in Australia helps illuminate the early history of eukaryotes, suggesting that this group was already abundant more than a billion years ago, according to a new study. Eukaryotes are believed to date back 2 billion years, but scientists thought that they only became widespread about 800 million years ago, said Dr.
In the new Nature study, Nettersheim and his colleagues, including Brocks, a professor of geobiology at the Australian National University, examined rocks from Australia’s Barney Creek Formation. Previous studies established that the Barney Creek rocks, which are more than 1 billion years old, contain traces of ancient biomolecules. But “people never looked, really, for these primordial types of steroids in those kinds of rocks,” Nettersheim said.
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