Remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago.
The life wasn’t created in six days as many religious people believe, but billions of years ago that process still continues as fossils scattered all over the world confirm and now the scientists have found a 3.7-billion-year-old fossil may be the oldest signs of life on Earth (See: wp/2016/08/31/3-7-billion-year-old-fossils-may-be-the-oldest-signs-of-life-on-earth/ ).
This is the remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago.
It is an amazing discovery in a scientific field that is always evolving and this would push the beginning of life more than 200 million back and support the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed.
A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled “Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures,” published Wednesday in Nature magazine.
They discovered this fossil in July 2012 while doing field research in Isua, a region of Greenland that was so remote that they had to travel there by helicopter. The i
s a well-known site that houses some of the oldest rocks on Earth, known as the Isua supracrustal belt. Allen Nutman, a University of Wollongong geologist, who has been studying these rocks there since 1980, was dumbfounded to find then as said one day he and his colleagues were working at the site and found them when they found some outcroppings they’d never seen before. The formations had been exposed where the snow pack had melted because of the global warming that is now so pronounced in Greenland that it exposed these rocks.
They examined the outcropping and immediately saw something captivating: conical structures, just one to four centimeters (less than two inches) high that look like fossilized microbial mats or the pillows of slime, known as stromatolites, formed by bacteria living in shallow water.
Subsequent laboratory analysis put the age of this formation as 3.7 billion years old, through radiometric dating, measuring the abundance of elements created by the steady decay of uranium.
Meaning, ours extreme ancestors came to Mother Earth about 3.7 billion years ago, that’s a lot of zeros put on a single human being’s life!
1 Comment
Interesting – but this picture does not belog to these text, showing the fossilized skeleton of some probably Jurassic (?) and only ;-) about 250 to 60 Million Year old Vertebrate like a Crocodile or Saurier and NOT a stromatolith like structure as described in the text.