The rose was the first color of life on Earth | Smart news

Fossils can tell us a little more about the plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, including their size, shape and even a little about their love life. But one thing they can not do is reveal what color were the creatures. Does T. rex have shades of turquoise and green, or muddy brown as it is represented in most works of art? It's hard to say since the organic pigments that produce the color usually degrade over time. Luke Henriques-Gomes at The Guardian reports that scientists have discovered the oldest organic color up to now, some bright pink that survived in 1.1 billion … [19659002] Organic pigments come from oil shale deposits drilled by an energy exploration company in the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa, about ten years ago. According to a press release, the researchers sprayed some of the rock to try to extract molecules from all the ancient organisms trapped inside. The presence of the surviving pigment, however, was a complete surprise. Graduate student Nur Gueneli of the Australian National University realized that she had found something special after mixing the powdered material with an organic solvent. According to Blake Foden at The Sydney Morning Herald the team was waiting for the mix to turn black. Instead, the solvent has turned pink. "I remember hearing this cry in the lab," writes Jochen Brocks, lead author of the article in . The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tell Henriques-Gomes. "[Gueneli] ran into my office and said," look at this, "and she had that bright pink stuff … It turned out to be the real pigment, 1.1 billion ds. years. "

The BBC reports that the pigment comes from the chlorophyll of fossilized cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, whose pigment molecules survived eons in the soil. Once diluted, the molecules appear pink when held against sunlight, but in their concentrated form they appear red and purple. For researchers looking at the first traces of life on Earth, finding the organic pigment, which is 600 million years older than the previous older example, is surprising. "Imagine that you could find a fossilized dinosaur skin that still has its original color, green or blue … it's exactly the type of discovery we've done."

The discovery also highlights one of the great mysteries of the evolution of life on Earth. Despite the existence of 4.6 billion years, an explosion of complex life on Earth has not occurred before about 650 million years ago. Some researchers have found evidence that the concentrations of oxygen on Earth, most created by cyanobacteria, were simply not high enough to sustain life up to that point, which would explain why life has remained a single cell for so long. Other recent studies, however, indicate that there was enough oxygen around for 1 billion years before complex life emerged. If that is the case, then something else was the limiting factor. Brocks thinks that cyan dominated oceans can be the culprit. The Sahara sample can be evidence that cyanobacteria were the dominant life form on Earth more than a billion years ago and caused an evolutionary bottleneck. Algae, although still microscopic, are 1000 times larger than cyanobacteria. The cyanobacterial oceans began to disappear about 650 million years ago, when algae began to spread rapidly to provide the energy necessary for the evolution of complex ecosystems where the large animals, including humans, could thrive on Earth. "

Some of these larger animals were, of course, dinosaurs and we start to have some clues about their color, at least those with feathers, which give the modern color of the feathers of birds, with melanosomes found in the few fossilized dino feathers we have, researchers are now able to guess what color their plumage was. sd that some of them were bright pink too.

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