Discover the oldest color on Earth!

Scientists extracted pigment from fossil bacteria preserved in rocks beneath the Sahara desert in Mauritania, West Africa. Within these bacteria, they discovered that chlorophyll, a pigment currently used by plants for photosynthesis, dates to about 1.1 billion years ago. It's about 600 million years older than the similar chlorophyll fossils found previously.

Their findings suggest that cyanobacteria, bacteria that survive with sunlight, appeared much earlier than seaweed, dating back to about 650 million years ago and the bacteria probably dominated the ancient oceans of Earth for hundreds of millions of years.

Chlorophyll is what gives modern plants their green color, we already know it; however, the fossilized chlorophyll in the cyanobacterial samples was dark red and dark purple in its concentrated form, the scientists reported.

When they sprayed the fossils to analyze the bacterial molecules, they distilled the colors and the result was a bright pink. This residual color suggests that ancient organisms that absorbed sunlight threw a pink hue into a vanished ocean, says Nur Gueneli, of the Earth Research Research School at the Australian National University (ANU) and leader of the work.

An old chlorophyll is only preserved under exceptional circumstances. First, dead organic matter (for example, a bloom of cyanobacteria) sinks rapidly into the seabed. Once there, it must be isolated from any exposure to oxygen, which stimulates decomposition, and then the rock containing the material must remain in one piece for 1 billion years, says Jochen Brocks, co – author of the study.

Scientists saw the colors produced by organisms that lived more than 1,000 million years ago and their reaction was: "It's a big surprise," said Mr. Brocks. Even algae, one of the oldest life forms, were absent or rare at the time when these bacteria were swallowing chlorophyll.

Several hundred million years have passed until algae begin to multiply. base of a food web that would feed the evolution of large animals. But, until the rise of algae and more complex organisms, the planet belonged to bacteria.

Thus, the cyanobacterial oceans began to disappear about 650 million years ago, when algae began to spread across the planet and where, later, large animals, including including humans, would flourish.

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