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    Thursday, June 08, 2006

    Earth's earliest life

    Ancient rock formations in Western Australia's Pilbara region are home to the earliest evidence not only of life on Earth, but also of biodiversity. That's the conclusion from research on 3.4-billion-year-old layered rock structures called stromatolites. Some palaeontologists think stromatolites were formed when growing mats of cyanobacteria trapped sediments and eventually fossilised. Examples of such living, growing mats can be found in Shark Bay, also in Western Australia. Other researchers, however, say that the fossil stromatolites were not formed by living organisms, but by physical and chemical processes around hydrothermal vents. Abigail Allwood of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and colleagues have now tried to settle the question by mapping stromatolites over the Strelley Pool Chert formation in Pilbara Craton. They conclude that the structures are biological and, more dramatically, that the different shapes of stromatolites they found suggest the mats formed a type of reef in which niche specialisation existed. The researchers described seven distinct types of stromatolite, ranging from cones to domed egg-carton shaped formations, which all appear in different environments. The team claims the complexity of the formations, the repetition of the shapes over an outcrop more than 10 kilometres long and their similarity with some younger structures identified as microbial fossils show that they were made by a biological process (Nature, vol 441, p 714). "This is the first time that all these different shapes have been documented, and they're quite distinct," Allwood says. The team thinks the mats that formed the stromatolites would have resembled a reef. "This is more than just evidence of possible life. It is evidence of biodiversity - that life had a firm foothold by 3.4 billion years ago - so that it pounced as soon as the opportunity arose," Allwood says. Read more...
    This was seized 4 u at New Scientist

    posted by Roland at 6/08/2006 03:21:00 PM | links to this post | 0 comments | Listen to this article Listen to this article

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