Evidence for early life in Earth’s oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates

@article{Dodd2017EvidenceFE,
  title={Evidence for early life in Earth’s oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates},
  author={Matthew S. Dodd and Dominic Papineau and Tor Grenne and John F. Slack and Martin Rittner and Franco Pirajno and Jonathan O’Neil and Crispin T. S. Little},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2017},
  volume={543},
  pages={60-64}
}
Although it is not known when or where life on Earth began, some of the earliest habitable environments may have been submarine-hydrothermal vents. Here we describe putative fossilized microorganisms that are at least 3,770 million and possibly 4,280 million years old in ferruginous sedimentary rocks, interpreted as seafloor-hydrothermal vent-related precipitates, from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada. These structures occur as micrometre-scale haematite tubes and filaments with… Expand
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