Page 28 - ARUBA TODAY

A28 SCIENCE
Thursday 2 March 2017

Tiny tubes in Canadian rock may be oldest known fossils

MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Tiny
tubes and filaments in
some Canadian rock ap-
pear to be the oldest
known fossils, giving new
support to some ideas
about how life began, a
new study says.
The features are mineral-
ized remains of what ap-
pear to be bacteria that
lived some 3.77 billion to
4.28 billion years ago, the
scientists said.
That would surpass the 3.7
billion years assigned to
some other rock features
found in Greenland, which
were proposed to be fossils
last August.
Such early-life findings are
not as clear-cut as, say,
digging up a dinosaur
bone.
The key question is always
whether the rock features
were really produced by
living things. The new study
hasn’t convinced every- This microscope image made available by Matthew Dodd in February 2017 shows a filament attached to a clump of iron at lower
body. right in rock found in Quebec, Canada.
The new results come from Associated Press
examining rock found
along the eastern shore ic filaments and tubes, peared within a rock type the finding supports pre- Kranendonk of the Univer-
of Hudson Bay in northern composed of an iron ox- called jasper. A single vious indications that life sity of New South Wales in
Quebec. The microscop- ide called hematite, ap- strand may represent a may have begun in such Australia, who reported
chain of cells. an environment, he said. the Greenland findings last
Matthew Dodd of Univer- He and colleagues pre- year, wrote in an email.
sity College London, an au- sented several lines of evi- The paper’s evidence for a
thor of the study published dence to support the idea biological origin falls short,
Wednesday by Nature, that the filaments and he said.
said the microbes lived tubes are signatures of past Abigail Allwood, a NASA
near a vent in the seafloor life. But two experts who’ve geologist, said the authors
where water was heated previously reported similar have produced “one of
by a volcano. findings said they’re not the most detailed cases yet
Since the fossil are nearly as convinced. made” for evidence of life
old as Earth, which formed “I would say they are in rocks older than 3.5 bil-
some 4.5 billion years ago, not fossils,” Martin J. Van lion years.q