Report a correction
The Gunflint microfossils
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.
Factual errors are corrected without argument once documented. What you send is read by a person and checked against sources — nothing changes automatically. See the editorial policy.