December 2016

A sulfur-oxidizing bacterium (Photo courtesy Andrew Czaja)

An article published in the magazine “Geology” describes the discovery of fossils of bacteria that date back to about 2.5 billion years ago. Those are exceptionally large sulfur-oxidizing bacteria compared to modern ones, of spherical shape with structures much larger than those of modern bacteria but similar to those of microorganisms that live today in sulfur-rich ocean depths. Above all, those are bacteria that lived before the Great Oxygenation Event.