Rocks hundreds of metres beneath the Australian Outback have yielded clues to a lost world of primitive microbes that once populated the world’s oceans and might have eventually given rise to modern plants and animals.
Credit: Dennis Kunkel Microscopy/Science Photo Library
“The previous story was that eukaryotes were extremely rare until 800 million years ago,” says Phoebe Cohen, a palaeobiologist at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the research. “Palaeontologists really bristled at that, because that’s not what we were seeing in the fossil record.” The findings, she says, help to bridge the gap between the two types of evidence.
Another possibility, however, was that researchers were looking for the wrong molecules. Benjamin Nettersheim, a geobiologist at the University of Bremen in Germany, Jochen Brocks, a palaeobiogeochemist at the Australian National University in Canberra, and their colleagues decided to focus on short-lived molecules that modern eukaryotes make while synthesizing sterols. Such modern intermediates might have been the end product for primeval eukaryotes.
The work could show why scientists could not find biochemical traces to confirm the fossil record, says Laura Katz, a biologist who studies microbial eukaryotes at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. “We were just looking for the wrong thing.
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