Researchers Find 1.6 Billion-Year-Old Plant-Like Fossils

Researchers from the Swedish Museum of Natural History have discovered 1.6 billion-year-old fossils of what they believe is red algae, which would be by far the oldest find of its kind ever recorded. Previously, the oldest such fossils dated back 1.2 billion years.

"You cannot be a hundred percent sure about material this ancient, as there is no DNA remaining, but the characters agree quite well with the morphology and structure of red algae," said Stefan Bengtson, professor emeritus at the museum and lead author on the paper describing the finding.

The research was published in the journal PLOS Biology Tuesday. The fossils were discovered in India.

Multicellular life only became common around 600 million years ago, scientists believe, after single-celled organisms first cropped up 3.5 billion years ago. These new findings suggest life beyond the microscopic scale may have begun much earlier than we thought.

"The 'time of visible life' seems to have begun much earlier than we thought," Bengston said.

Therese Sallstedt, then a doctoral student, was the first to discover the complex, fleshy structures that indicated there was something particularly special in these fossils.

"I got so excited I had to walk three times around the building before I went to my supervisor to tell him what I had seen!" she said.

Read the full open-access paper>>

Photo credit: Stefan Bengtson