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Oldest Fossils on Planet Discovered in Australia
The Pilbara discovery, if proven, could help Curiosity’s search for the building blocks of life on Mars. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Newly discovered fossils in Australia may have been living 3.49 billion years ago, according to scientists.
The traces bacteria “are the oldest fossils ever described,” said Nora Noffke, a biogeochemist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. “Those are our oldest ancestors.”
In the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Unlike dinosaur bones, the newly identified fossils are not petrified body parts. They’re textures on the surfaces of sandstone thought to be sculpted by once-living organisms. Today, similar patterns decorate parts of Tunisia’s coast, created by thick mats of bacteria that trap and glue together sand particles. Sand that is stuck to the land beneath the mats and thus protected from erosion can over time turn into rock that can long outlast the living organisms above it.
Finding the earliest remnants of this process required a long, hard look at some of the planet’s oldest rocks, located in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. This ancient landscape was once shoreline. Rocks made from sediment piled up billions of years ago are now exposed and available for examination.”
Many of the textures in the Australian rocks had shown up before in 2.9 billion year old rocks in South Africa.
These newly discovered traces of life, though, beat the previously discovered ones by more than half a billion years.
“Studying this kind of past life is really about learning how the Earth got to be the way it is today,” Michael Tice, a geobiologist at Texas A&M University, told the Herald.
The results were presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in November.
