Evidence of 1-Billion-Year-Old ‘Lost World’ of Microbes Discovered Beneath Australian Outback
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.
Analysis of fat-like molecules isolated from the rocks suggests that they were made by a previously undiscovered, ancient population of organisms called eukaryotes, the group of living things whose cells typically contain a nucleus and other internal compartments. The molecules are 1.6 billion years old…