Fossils unintentionally found in South Africa are most likely the most seasoned growths at any point found by an edge of 1.2 billion years, reworking the transformative story of these life forms which are neither flora nor fauna, as per the scientists. The report was prepared by a group of scientists on Monday.
According to Phys.org, these discovered fossils can be the earliest known specimens in the formation of life, to which the human beings belong. The research report was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. If the fossil is verified as both multicellular and fungal, this can be the 2.4 billion-year-old minuscule creatures.
Till now, the first discovered fossils trace of eukaryotes is dated to only 1.9 billion years ago, called as the superkingdom, including animals, plants as well as fungi, except bacteria. As per the estimates, the planet earth is itself 4.6 billion years old.
AFP reported that these fossils were found 2600 feet beneath the South Africa's Northern Cape Province. They are significant not only for their age but also for their origin. Until the present time, it was known that the first fungi developed on land. However, the recently discovered fossils lived and flourished under an old sea seabed, tucked in the fissure of the volcanic rock.
According to the co-author of the research paper Birger Rasmussen, the fossils were discovered accidently as nobody was searching for it. The scientists were only examining samples of lava from the Ongeluk Formation for age determination. Birger Rasmussen is a geology professor at the Curtin University in Bentley.
While examining the lava, Rasmussen found series of petrified gas bubbles after increasing the microscopic magnification. The bubbles had a number of filaments in it which supported a form of life, which were the fossils. The examining lava was thought to be 2.2 billion years old, but after deep research, it was found to be 2.4 billion years old.
The additional 200 million years was huge on the grounds that it straddles a basic limit in Earth's land history called the Great Oxidation Event-a quick and enormous overflowing of oxygen into the air. This fungus-like creature or the fossils were living in the dark and were lacking oxygen. The discovery of these fungus-like creatures has challenged the current theory of the history of eukaryotes, that when and where they evolved.
