Could be the oldest red algaes ever found.
The discovery of 1.6-billion-year-old fossilized cells from sedimentary rocks of central India has propelled scientists to rethink the genesis of life on the Earth. After this discovery, scientists have concluded that early life forms, which eventually gave birth to flora and fauna, appeared more than 400 million years earlier than it was believed till now.
According to a report published in the journal PLOS, the last common ancestor of modern eukaryotes – Plantae, Fungi, and Metazoa – generally believed to have lived during the Mesoproterozoic era, about 1.6 to 1 billion years ago.
The fossils found in India predate the earliest red algae by about 400 million years, suggesting that eukaryotes may have a longer history than commonly assumed, according to the researchers.
The new fossils found show two distinct types of red algae: Rafatazmia chitrakootensis and Denaricion mendax.
Rafatazmia chitrakootensis n. gen, n. sp., has uniserial rows of large cells and grows through diffusely distributed septation. Each cell has a centrally suspended, conspicuous rhomboidal disk interpreted as a pyrenoid.
Denaricion mendax, on the other hand, has coin-like cells reminiscent of those in large sulfur-oxidizing bacteria but much more recalcitrant than the liquid-vacuole-filled cells of the latter. There are also resemblances with oscillatoriacean cyanobacteria, although cell volumes in the latter are much smaller.
If the findings of the scientists are true, the newly discovered fossil cells predate the oldest previously accepted red alga in the fossil record by about 400 million years.