Fossils in canada dating earth
There might have been granite, continental-like crust, though that's controversial, she said.
Any life that could have existed would have been a prokaryote (a single-celled organism without membrane-bound nuclei or cell organelles), Bell added.
WASHINGTON, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Rocky outcrops in eastern Canada contain what may be some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth, dating back about 3.95 billion years.
Scientists said on Wednesday they found indirect evidence of life in the form of bits of graphite contained in sedimentary rocks from northern Labrador that they believe are remnants of primordial marine microorganisms.
In a paper published in July 2016 in the journal Nature Microbiology, researchers analyzed prokaryotes to find the proteins and genes common to all of these organisms, presumably the final remnants of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) — the first shared relative from which all life today descends.
The research team found 355 proteins shared by all archaeal and bacterial lineages.
In 2015, the research team reported discovering graphite, a form of carbon, in 4.1-billion-year-old crystals of zircon.
The ratio of isotopes in the graphite suggested a biological origin, Bell and her colleagues wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago and the oceans appeared roughly 4.4 billion years ago.The researchers first reported in 1996 in the journal Nature that isotopes (forms of an element with different numbers of neutrons) in those rocks might indicate ancient metabolic activity by some mystery microbe.