Scientists discover traces of a new group of previously unknown organisms called 'protosteroids' who ruled complex life on Earth about a billion years ago.
extend the current record of fossil steroids up to 1.6 billion years . Another remarkable achievement lies in just how the discovery was made.
“From previous research we already knew how and where on Earth to find this precious molecular record of early life on Earth: there are only a few places in the world where ancient sediments have never been buried deeper than a few kilometres and never heated to a degree that diagnostic ecological information of original biomolecules is completely lost by geothermal heating and geological transformation processes,” he wrote.
To find these missing fossils, scientists had to create new search templates in the laboratory, after which they began finding fossil steroids in virtually all biomarker-bearing rocks in the time period between 800 million and 1.6 billion years. Of these, only the bacterial hopanoids were known, according to Nettersheim.
This would mean that ... it is only in the Tonian period some 800 million years ago that modern types of eukaryotes such as red algae and heterotrophic eukaryotes, so called protists, such as ciliates or amoebozoans, became truly abundant and ecologically important on a global scale.”The researchers believe their findings solidify our understanding of a major change that took place during the Tonian period, as the age from around one billion to 720 million years ago is known.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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