The Earth's oldest color is bright pink

The researchers discovered the oldest known color produced by a living organism. It is over a billion years old and is colorful in bright pink. The researchers discovered the color of fossils of cyanobacteria preserved in the Sahara desert rocks. When the scientists extracted the pigment from the bacteria, they found dark red and dark purple spots in concentrated form. Distilled, it became bright pink

"Bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that have been produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting an ancient ocean long gone" , says Dr. Gueneli, a researcher at the ANU School of Earth Sciences Research. It is likely that the bacteria dominated the ancient oceans for hundreds of millions of years, perhaps throwing a pink hue to the ocean itself. The rose-producing cyanobacteria are so old that even the algae, one of the oldest forms of life on earth, have been rarely found. "It was really a foreign world," said study co-author Jochen Brocks at LiveScience

A few hundred million years later, algae would begin to multiply and begin to form the beginning of a food web Until now, pink cyanobacteria reigned over the oceans

It took a series of very lucky events to preserve chlorophyll: after the dead organic matter has sunk in the seabed, she had to settle in an isolated place not only exposed to oxygen, but the rock that kept there had to survive in a single billion d & # 39; # 39; years.

(via Livescience)