Green Algae Origination Date Pushed to Nearly 1 Gya

[connorp]

This is a pretty great discovery!

 

Quote from news article:

"Scientists have found in rocks from northern China what may be the oldest fossils of a green plant ever found: tiny seaweed that carpeted areas of the seafloor 1bn years ago and were part of a primordial revolution among life on Earth."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/24/tiny-chinese-seaweed-is-oldest-green-plant-fossil-ever-found

 

 

Abstract from Nature:

 

"Chlorophytes (representing a clade within the Viridiplantae and a sister group of the Streptophyta) probably dominated marine export bioproductivity and played a key role in facilitating ecosystem complexity before the Mesozoic diversification of phototrophic eukaryotes such as diatoms, coccolithophorans and dinoflagellates. Molecular clock and biomarker data indicate that chlorophytes diverged in the Mesoproterozoic or early Neoproterozoic, followed by their subsequent phylogenetic diversification, multicellular evolution and ecological expansion in the late Neoproterozoic and Palaeozoic. This model, however, has not been rigorously tested with palaeontological data because of the scarcity of Proterozoic chlorophyte fossils. Here we report abundant millimetre-sized, multicellular and morphologically differentiated macrofossils from rocks approximately 1,000 million years ago. These fossils are described as Proterocladus antiquus new species and are interpreted as benthic siphonocladalean chlorophytes, suggesting that chlorophytes acquired macroscopic size, multicellularity and cellular differentiation nearly a billion years ago, much earlier than previously thought."

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1122-9

 

[DPS Ammonite]

Not surprising that there was so much life in the ocean 1 billion years ago. At the same time terrestrial fungi fossils have been found on land.

 

Now that we have added the older geological time units (including periods) into our collections area, our members can add their “Precambrian” finds. I don’t think that there will be a rush to add fossils; it is rare to find identifiable fossils that are so old. 
 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1217-0

 

Loron, Corentin, et al., 2019, “Early fungi from the Proterozoic era in Arctic Canada”, Nature, volume 570, 232–235.

 

 

[digit]

Yup. My "media network" spotted this and forwarded it to me. More efficient than reading the news for myself.

 

Cool article on a pivotal change to the biosphere that these early photosynthesizers made.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken