They discover the "oldest color on Earth" | ELESPECTADOR.COM

After badyzing rocks found in the Sahara Desert, the researchers found the oldest pigments known to date. They are "bright pink" and have 1,100 million years

" Imagine that you can find the skin of a dinosaur fossil with its original color, for example green or blue, that's the kind of discovery we made. We are talking about real molecules, the world's oldest colored molecules. "(Lea elephants could disappear in 15 years due to the ivory trade)

With these words, Jochen Brocks, a scientist from the National University of Australia, explained to the BBC channel the discovery he had just published, along with another group of researchers, in the Proceedings of the journal of the National Academy of Sciences "(PNAS), which goes around the world. (Read Israel will become the fourth country to reach the Moon)

What Brocks refers to is a discovery they made in West Africa, in the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania. There, in the Sahara Desert, in the middle of a geological register, they discovered what until now are the oldest pigments (they are 500 thousand years older than those known until now). They were inside rocks known as black sea shales and their color surprised scientists: they range from blood red to dark purple and when they are diluted, they acquire a bright pink hue

"The bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll produced by photosynthetic organisms that lived in a long-vanished ocean," said Nur Gueneli, of the School of Earth Sciences of 39, National University of Australia (ANU), quoted by the Spanish newspaper ABC.

After finding the rocks originally discovered by a mining company that drilled hundreds of meters deep ten years ago, the group of researchers crushed them. In doing so, he discovered these pigments aged about 1 100 million years

. According to Brocks, chlorophyll was produced by cyanobacteria, organisms that carried out photosynthesis and lived in an extinct ocean while there were no animals yet. Most likely, he explains, is that these ecosystems disappeared 650 million years ago, when algae began to be a source of energy for the evolution of water. more complex ecosystems.