Some of Earth's earliest known life can be found in western Australia.
The stromatolites in question are formed by the excretions of organisms. The oldest stromatolites that scientists agree were made by living organisms are older than the older ones. Stromatolites have been found in the Dresser Formation.
Billions of years have wiped away traces of organic matter in these older stromatolites, raising questions about whether they were created by microbes or if they were made by other geological processes.
According to the new study, it was ancient life.
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Keyron Hickman-Lewis, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, led the research.
The oldest animal life on Earth could be found. It is related to your bath sponge.
There could be implications for the search for life on Mars. The stromatolites are covered in iron oxide from the reaction of iron with oxygen. The rusty orange color of Mars' surface is due to the oxidation of it.
The National Center for Scientific Research in France was where the Western Australian stromatolites were discovered. The layers of the stromatolite were peered into using a variety of high-resolution 2D and 3D techniques.
They saw something that looked like biological growth. Modern stromatolites are found in a few locations around the globe.
"Microbial mats give you layers that are not evenly distributed in their thickness and can go up and down on very small spatial scales," said Linda Kah, a professor at the University of Michigan. She told Live Science that when you put all the structural clues together, you end up with a mat.
The evidence doesn't show that the Dresser Formation stromatolites are the oldest living things on the planet. It's possible that stromatolites found in 3.7 billion-year-old rock in Greenland will be honored. These finds and others from a similar time period are controversial because it's hard to distinguish biological life from non-organic processes.
The Western Australia microbial mats are thought to have formed in a shallow lagoon fed by hydrothermal vents that connect to the ocean.
If Mars samples can be returned to Earth, the techniques used to study the Western Australian stromatolites could be used to find life on the red planet.
When we have materials from Mars, scientists should consider some of the analyses here as a trial run.
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