February 8, 2015

A rock containing 2.3 billion years old bacteria fossils, visible in dark areas (Image courtesy J. William Schopf/UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. All rights reserved)

An international team of researchers discovered a type of deep-sea microorganism that appears to have remained unchanged for over 2 billion years. There are many species considered living fossils because they remained very similar in the course of many million of years but this is a really extreme case. Those are sulfu-cycling microorganisms that are now found in mud off the coast of Chile and are indistinguishable from fossils that date back to different past eras.