Comments on: 3 Billion-Year-Old Sulfur-Eating Microbes May Be the Oldest Fossils Ever Found http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/08/23/3-billion-year-old-sulfur-eating-microbes-may-be-the-oldest-fossils-ever-found/ Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:34:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.2 By: Torbjörn Larsson, OM http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/08/23/3-billion-year-old-sulfur-eating-microbes-may-be-the-oldest-fossils-ever-found/#comment-29136 Torbjörn Larsson, OM Sat, 27 Aug 2011 11:02:16 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=31305#comment-29136 I am glad Brasier et al found methods and results that are so much more testable than Schopf et al pattern search. This is interesting from two other aspects. - Strelley Pool formation, the find site, has earlier yielded <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/106/24/9548" rel="nofollow">stromatolites with micro-structures much as testable for bacterial origination</a>. I don't think they were effectively touched by Brasier's criticism. - And the old, not very constrained (putatively ~ 4.28 - 3.85 Ga bp), Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt may have signs of precisely sulfur metabolism as well. At least you can find, unfortunately unpublished, texts to that effect on the web. It would be nice if the Strelley Pool and the Nuvvuagittuq results coalesce on the same ancestral metabolism and push it further back in time, it would be a reasonable hope at this stage. I am glad Brasier et al found methods and results that are so much more testable than Schopf et al pattern search.

This is interesting from two other aspects.

- Strelley Pool formation, the find site, has earlier yielded stromatolites with micro-structures much as testable for bacterial origination. I don’t think they were effectively touched by Brasier’s criticism.

- And the old, not very constrained (putatively ~ 4.28 – 3.85 Ga bp), Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt may have signs of precisely sulfur metabolism as well. At least you can find, unfortunately unpublished, texts to that effect on the web.

It would be nice if the Strelley Pool and the Nuvvuagittuq results coalesce on the same ancestral metabolism and push it further back in time, it would be a reasonable hope at this stage.

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