Long before calamitous became the world ’s most fashionable color , life on Earth was coiffe inneon garden pink . Remnants of this distant rose - tinted era can still be seen in the fossilized clay of bacterium that live in an ancient sea 1.1 billion year ago , produce them the oldest know biologic pigments on the satellite .
The breakthrough was made in 2018 , when researchers analyse rock find in a nautical shale deposit C of meters below the aerofoil of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania . Amazingly , the research worker were able to pull up molecular fossils of chlorophyl from the fossilizedcyanobacteriawithin this primordial rock , pass the next oldest examples by around 600 million years .
Normally green in color , chlorophyll is the basal paint found in photosynthesizing plants and algae , yet took on dark red andpurplehues when extracted in concentrated form from the ancient microbes . After dilution , the paint look brightpink , provide a glimpse of the tincture that may have colored the early seas .
" The bright pink pigment are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organism dwell an ancient ocean that has long since vanished , " explain cogitation author Dr Nur Gueneli in astatement .
In improver to resurrecting the early known biologic color , the researchers were also able-bodied to retrace the authorship of photosynthetic life in the oceans of the mid - Proterozoic epoch , which survive from around 1.8 billion to 800 million long time ago . By analyzing the nitrogen isotopic values within the fossilizedpigment , they determined that these ancient ocean were dominated by tiny cyanobacteria , while big planktonic algae were virtually missing .
Such a determination help to explicate why complex fauna had not yet acquire at this sentence , suggesting that the form of photosynthesizing germ that live at the sentence simply were n’t prominent enough to keep extremely highly-developed life form .
" The exact analysis of the ancient pigment confirmed that tiny cyanobacteria dominate the base of the food string in the oceans a billion years ago , which serve to explicate why animate being did not exist at the time , " Dr Gueneli tell .
" alga , although still microscopic , are a thousand times larger in volume than cyanobacteria , and are a much richer intellectual nourishment source , " continued study author Dr Jochen Brocks .
" The cyanobacterial oceans started to vanish about 650 million years ago , when alga start to rapidly overspread to furnish the burst of vigour needed for the development of complex ecosystems , where large animals , including humankind , could thrive on Earth , " added Brocks .
The field of study is published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
