The Gunflint microfossils
The proof that life is far older than shells
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The Gunflint Formation is an iron-bearing rock along Lake Superior, laid down 1.88 billion years ago, and it holds the oldest microfossils that are generally accepted as such. The find was published in 1954 by Stanley Tyler and Elso Barghoorn and is regarded as the beginning of Precambrian palaeontology. It resolved a problem Darwin himself had raised: that the fossil record apparently began abruptly in the Cambrian, with no forerunners. The Gunflint organisms resemble cyanobacteria and iron-oxidising bacteria, and they are laid down in the same banded iron formations that later underwrote the steel industry around the Great Lakes.
For children
In a flinty rock by Lake Superior, researchers found tiny threads and spheres that turned out to be bacteria living almost two billion years ago. Before this, many believed there were hardly any fossils older than half a billion years.
Sources
- Tyler & Barghoorn, Science 119 (1954) — «Occurrence of Structurally Preserved Plants in Pre-Cambrian Rocks of the Canadian Shield»
- Knoll, Life on a Young Planet (2003)
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