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At first the Earth was not green as we see it today. Neither gray nor yellowish. It seems like it was an intense rose.
This suggests a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which reveals that this color was due to one of the primitive organisms of the time.
Scientists extracted fossil pigment from bacteria left on the rocks beneath the Mauritanian desert. On them, they found chlorophyll, the pigment used today by plants in photosynthesis, which dates back to 1.1 billion years, some 600 million years older than the others. Chlorophyll fossils previously found.
The discovery suggests that cyanobacteria, the one that survives sunlight, appeared long before seaweed. These bacteria have dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years.
Chlorophyll is what gives plants their green color, but the chlorophyll fossilized in the cyanobacterium was dark red and dark purple.
When they sprayed the fossils To badyze the molecules of the bacteria, they distilled the colors to find a bright pink. This colorful residue suggests that these sun-dependent organisms have colored the oceans pink at the time, said Nur Gueneli, head of research at the National University of Australia.
Such an old chlorophyll is only preserved under exceptional conditions. , according to co-author Jochen Brocks: organic matter, cyanobacteria for example, falls to the bottom, there must be isolated from the oxygen that would break it down, then the rock that contains it must remain in one single piece for billions of years.
At that time, there was no or little algae, another of the first life forms on the planet.
Until their flowering, the planet was dominated by bacteria.
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