Scientists have discovered microfossils they believe are more than three-and-a-half billion years old, which would make them the oldest ever discovered.
The microscopic fossils provide evidence of one of the oldest bacterial lifeforms on Earth that lived 3,700 million years ago.
Dr Dominic Papineau from UCL said: “The microfossils we discovered are about 300 million years older than the previously thought oldest microfossils”.
His team say the creatures lived underwater and emerged from hot vents on the sea floor not long after the Earth was formed.
And it’s not just about the beginnings of life on Earth. The fossils could be used to find evidence for living things on other planets.
“If we are right with our new model for the origin of these spheroidal structures in these rocks that contain these fossils, then we might want to look for these kind of things on other ancient planetary surfaces such as the surface of Mars,” Papineau says.
A paper on their findings has been published in the scientific journal Nature.
