• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“Lost World” Of Early Ancestors Revealed In Billion-Year-Old Fossilized Fat Molecules

June 7, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Fossilized fats that date back over a billion years have revealed a whole community of previously unknown organisms that were shaping Earth’s ecosystems during the planet’s middle age. They were abundant in marine ecosystems, and while we don’t know what they would’ve looked like, they were considerably more complex than bacteria – something they may have used to their advantage.

“We believe they may have been the first predators on Earth, hunting and devouring bacteria,” said Jochen Brocks from the Australian National University (ANU), who shares first authorship of the study, in a statement sent to IFLScience.

Advertisement

The “Protosterol Biota”, which produced the “protosteroids” found, belong to a group of organisms known as eukaryotes, which is a massive umbrella that also encompasses fungi, plants, single-celled organisms, and animals – that’s us! They were very different from the eukaryotes we know today, however, as they evolved on a planet where there was very little oxygen.

Finding them involved studying fossilized fat molecules trapped within rock that formed at the bottom of what’s now Australia’s Northern Territory around 1.6 billion years ago. Inside the molecules, scientists detected primordial chemical signatures that hinted they had stumbled across something significant.

fossil fat

Fossilized fat has historically turned up a lot of ancient life.

Image credit: The Australian National University

If you’re wondering what fats could have to do with anything, there is a logical reason scientists are looking inside these molecules for clues about early life.

“Almost all eukaryotes biosynthesize steroids, such as cholesterol that is produced by humans and most other animals,” said Benjamin Nettersheim from MARUM, University of Bremen, Brock’s co-first-author, in another statement.

Advertisement

“Due to potentially adverse health effects of elevated cholesterol levels in humans, cholesterol doesn’t have the best reputation from a medical perspective. However, these lipid molecules are integral parts of eukaryotic cell membranes where they aid in a variety of physiological functions. By searching for fossilized steroids in ancient rocks, we can trace the evolution of increasingly complex life.”

In the evolutionary tree, the lineage of plants, animals, and fungi all link back to the last shared ancestor. Since that’s all the eukaryotes, it’s known as the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA). The biomarker signatures found trapped within the fossilized fat molecules indicated to researchers that these protosteroids may have come from that same LECA which gave rise to everybody else. So, if you’re partial to embroidery, it looks like it’s time to get stitching at the base of our family tree.

protosteroid

Another psychedelic artist’s impression of what early protosteroid-producing life might have looked like.

Image credit: Orchestrated in MidJourney by TA 2023

“The highlight of this finding is not just the extension of the current molecular record of eukaryotes,” added Christian Hallmann, one of the participating scientists from the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam.

“Given that the last common ancestor of all modern eukaryotes, including us humans, was likely capable of producing ‘regular’ modern sterols, chances are high that the eukaryotes responsible for these rare signatures belonged to the stem of the phylogenetic tree”.

Advertisement

Trying to study ancient microbial worlds represents an enormous challenge for scientists, but discoveries such as this one bring us closer to tracing back to our roots and the microscopic eukaryotes that lived there. The team hopes next to zoom in on early eukaryotic life by shooting lasers at rocks coupled to an ultra-high resolution mass spectrometer.

Now there’s a Bond-esque methodology we can all get behind.

The study is published in Nature.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Take Five: Big in Japan
  2. Struggle over Egypt’s Juhayna behind arrest of founder, son – Amnesty
  3. Exclusive-Northvolt plots EV battery grab with $750 million Swedish lab plan
  4. New Record Set With 17 People In Earth Orbit At The Same Time

Source Link: “Lost World” Of Early Ancestors Revealed In Billion-Year-Old Fossilized Fat Molecules

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Biosignatures, New Brain Implant Can Decode Your Internal Monologue, And Much More This Week
  • Crocodiles Weren’t All Blood-Thirsty Killers, Some Evolved To Be Plant-Eating Vegetarians
  • Stratospheric Warming Event May Be Unfolding In The Southern Polar Vortex, Shaking Up Global Weather Systems
  • 15 Years Ago, Bees In Brooklyn Appeared Red After Snacking Where They Shouldn’t
  • Carnian Pluvial Event: It Rained For 2 Million Years — And It Changed Planet Earth Forever
  • There’s Volcanic Unrest At The Campi Flegrei Caldera – Here’s What We Know
  • The “Rumpelstiltskin Effect”: When Just Getting A Diagnosis Is Enough To Start The Healing
  • In 1962, A Boy Found A Radioactive Capsule And Brought It Inside His House — With Tragic Results
  • This Cute Creature Has One Of The Largest Genomes Of Any Mammal, With 114 Chromosomes
  • Little Air And Dramatic Evolutionary Changes Await Future Humans On Mars
  • “Black Hole Stars” Might Solve Unexplained JWST Discovery
  • Pretty In Purple: Why Do Some Otters Have Purple Teeth And Bones? It’s All Down To Their Spiky Diets
  • The World’s Largest Carnivoran Is A 3,600-Kilogram Giant That Weighs More Than Your Car
  • Devastating “Rogue Waves” Finally Have An Explanation
  • Meet The “Masked Seducer”, A Unique Bat With A Never-Before-Seen Courtship Display
  • Alaska’s Salmon River Is Turning Orange – And It’s A Stark Warning
  • Meet The Heaviest Jelly In The Seas, Weighing Over Twice As Much As A Grand Piano
  • For The First Time, We’ve Found Evidence Climate Change Is Attracting Invasive Species To Canadian Arctic
  • What Are Microfiber Cloths, And How Do They Clean So Well?
  • Stowaway Rat That Hopped On A Flight From Miami Was A “Wake-Up Call” For Global Health
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version