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News From the Field

Bacterial Growths May Offer Clues About Earth's Distant Past


May 17, 2010

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Deciphering the few clues about ancient bacterial life that are seen in these poorly preserved rocks has been difficult, but researchers from MIT and the Russian Academy of Sciences may have found a way to glean new information from the fossils. Specifically, they have linked the even spacing between the thousands of tiny cones that dot the surfaces of stromatolite-forming microbial mats--a pattern that also appears in cross-sectional slices of stromatolites that are 2.8 billion years old.Full Story

Source
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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