Stromatolites are not only Earth's oldest of fossils, but are intriguing in that they are our singular visual portal (except for phylogenetic determination of conserved nucleic acid sequences and some subtle molecular fossils) into deep time on earth, the emergence of life, and the evolving of the beautiful forms of life of modern time.
A small piece of stromatolites encodes biological activity perhaps spanning thousands of years. In broad terms, stromatolites are fossil evidence of the prokaryotic life that remains today, as it has always been, the preponderance of biomass in the biosphere.
For those that subscribe2.3 billion year old stromatolites from Michigan to the theory of the living earth, it is the prokaryotes that maintain the homeostasis of the earth, rendering the biosphere habitable for all other life.
They maintain and recycle the atomic ingredients of which proteins, the essence of life, are made, including oxygen, nitrogen and carbon.
We humans are, in simple terms, bags of water filled with proteins and prokaryotic bacteria (the bacteria in your body outnumber the cells in your body about 10 to 1).
We humans have descended from organisms that adapted to living in a prokaryotic world, and we humans retain (conserved in evolutionary terms) in our Eukaraotic mitochondria the cellular machinery to power our cells that we inherited (i.e., Endosymbiosis) from the prokaryotes of deep time on earth.
Read more at the Fossil Museum
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