WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microfossils up to almost 4.3 billion years old found in Canada of microbes are similar to the bacteria that thrive today around sea floor hydrothermal vents and may represent the oldest-known evidence of life on Earth, scientists said on Wednesday.

Haematite tubes from the NSB hydrothermal vent deposits in Quebec, Canada that represent the oldest microfossils and evidence for life on Earth are pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters March 1, 2017. The remains are at least 3,770 million years old. Matthew Dodd/University College London/Handout via REUTERS

The fossils from the Hudson Bay shoreline in northern Quebec near the Nastapoka Islands lend credence to the hypothesis that hydrothermal vents spewing hot water may have been the cradle of life on Earth relatively soon after the planet formed, the researchers said.

They also said Earth’s planetary neighbor Mars at that time is thought to have had oceans, long since gone, that may have boasted similar conditions conducive to the advent of life.

Tiny filaments and tubes made of a form of iron oxide, or rust, formed by the microbes were found encased in layers of quartz that experts have determined to be between 3.77 billion and 4.28 billion years old, according to the study published in the journal Nature.

The researchers expressed confidence the fossils from northeastern Canada were formed by organisms, saying no non-biological explanation was plausible.

It was primordial microbes like those described in the study that set in motion the evolutionary march toward complex life and, eventually, the appearance of humans 200,000 years ago.

“Understanding how and when life began on Earth helps answer the long-standing questions: Where do we come from? Is there life elsewhere in the universe?” said study researcher Matthew Dodd, a University College London biogeochemist.

The scientists said the primordial microbes’ structure closely resembled modern bacteria that dwell near iron-rich hydrothermal vents. They believe that, like their modern counterparts, they were iron-eaters. The rock’s composition was consistent with a deep-sea vent environment.

“This is important for the origin of life,” said study researcher Dominic Papineau, a University College London astrobiologist. “It shows microbial life diversified to specialized microbes very early in Earth history.

“It is also important for the evolution of life. It shows that some microbes have not changed significantly” since Earth’s early times, Papineau said.

Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago and the oceans appeared about 4.4 billion years ago. If the fossils are indeed 4.28 billion years old, that would suggest “an almost instantaneous emergence of life” after ocean formation, Dodd said.

The fossils appear to be older than any other previously discovered evidence of life. For example, other scientists last year described 3.7 billion-year-old fossilized microbial mats, called stromatolites, from Greenland.</s>Amid the crags and scrublands of Northern Quebec, a stone’s throw from the shores of Hudson Bay, scientists have stumbled upon what could be the earliest known chapter in the story of life on Earth.

In a find that is certain to spark debate among experts, a team of Canadian and international researchers has determined that tiny filament-like structures found in rock samples from an ancient outcrop are the mineral remains of bacteria that lived more than 3.77 billion years ago.

If the interpretation is correct it means the curious formation where the rocks were found – known to geologists as the Nuvvuagittuq belt – bears the first direct signs of the microbial life that inhabited our planet billions of years before the emergence of multicellular plants and animals.

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“This will definitely come as a big surprise to the scientific community, no doubt about it,” said Dominic Papineau, a geochemist at University College London in the U.K., who led the work.

The surprise is not that life existed at such a remote time. Scientists have long suspected that ancestral micro-organisms emerged soon after Earth formed a stable surface with an ocean and atmosphere. Carbon isotopes measured in ancient rocks also offer an indirect clue that something was alive back then.

But picking out preserved traces of that initial flowering of life is another matter. A similar claim of microfossils in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks from Western Australia has long been disputed. Last year, a recent find in Greenland pushed the clock further back to 3.7 billion years ago. Now the Canadian find, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reaches back even further – possibly much further depending on precisely how old the Nuvvuagittuq rocks and the features they carry turn out to be.

Today those rocks are found in exposed glacier-polished outcrops that protrude from the lichens and other vegetation of the Northern Quebec tundra. When they formed they were part of an ancient ocean crust atop simmering volcanic activity that powered hydrothermal eruptions and oozed lava onto the seafloor.

“We think this is where life started and thrived, in these kinds of environments,” said Jonathan O’Neil, a University of Ottawa geologist and team member who has studied the unique belt since it was first spotted in a regional survey more than a decade ago.

Dr. O’Neil’s earlier work suggests the belt could be up to 4.28 billion years old, making it the most venerable fragment of Earth’s crust found anywhere. However, this figure is not universally accepted. The type of rock that the belt is made of – a layered blend of basalt and chert – can only be dated by using a method that is less accurate than the one used to date a section of continental crust in the Northwest Territories thought to be about as old.

During a 2008 expedition, Dr. Papineau collected samples from a burst of brick-coloured rock in the belt that he suspected to be the remains of a hydrothermal vent. It was in these rocks that the team later found filaments of the mineral hematite along with other structures that resemble those produced by iron-loving bacteria found around hydrothermal systems today.

In their publication, the team argues that the filaments are similar in age to the rock formation itself – a key step for making the case that they’re the earliest evidence of life to date.

Bradley De Gregorio, a geologist with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said the reasoning was persuasive. “It would lead me to think that these features they’re finding actually do match the age of the rock,” he said.

Boswell Wing, a University of Colorado geobiologist who has also studied the Nuvvuagittuq belt, was less convinced. He said the team would need to do more to rule out other explanations for the location where the samples were gathered, and the possibility that it formed at a later time relative to the belt.

“These rocks have been cooked, they’ve been squeezed, they’ve been cooled down, then cooked and squeezed again. The picture is a complicated one,” he said.

Dr. Wing added that the most important thing about the discovery is that it would draw attention to the area’s geological significance and encourage other scientists to explore the Quebec site.

“It is a fantastic resource. Anyone who’s been there can recognize that right away,” he said.</s>Scientists announced on March 1, 2017 that they’ve identified the remains of 3,770-million-year-old microorganisms, now the oldest known microfossils on Earth. The discovery is in the form of tiny filaments and tubes – formed by bacteria – that lived on iron. They were found encased in quartz layers in what scientists call the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, in Quebec, Canada. This region was already known to contain some of Earth’s oldest rocks.

The scientists say this part of Canada likely once formed part of an iron-rich deep-sea hydrothermal vent system, which provided a habitat for some of Earth’s first life forms, between 3,770 and 4,300 million years ago.

Their work is published March 1 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. First author is Matthew Dodd, a PhD student at UCL Earth Sciences and the London Centre for Nanotechnology. He said in a statement:

Prior to this discovery, the oldest microfossils were reportedly found in Western Australia and dated at 3,460 million years. But not all scientists agreed the earlier discovery was indicative of life; instead, some believed it was related to non-biological artifacts in the rocks.

That’s why the UCL-led team made it a priority to determine whether the remains from Canada had biological origins. They ultimately accomplished this by identifying structures in the mineralized fossils associated with putrefaction, an end-of-life process.

These discoveries demonstrate life developed on Earth at a time when Mars and Earth had liquid water at their surfaces, posing exciting questions for extra-terrestrial life. Therefore, we expect to find evidence for past life on Mars 4,000 million years ago, or if not, Earth may have been a special exception.

Bottom line: An international team of scientists announced on March 1, 2017 that it has identified the remains of 3,770-million-year-old microorganisms, now the oldest known microfossils on Earth, in Quebec, Canada.</s>Microfossils found in Quebec rock may be up to 4.3 billion years old and represent the oldest-known evidence of life on Earth.</s>Fossil evidence of small microscopic organisms that are at least 3770 million years old has been found by a team of researchers. This is proof regarding the oldest life forms on earth.

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They consisted of small tubules and cilia that were excrescences on bacteria that thrived on iron. These were discovered sandwiched between quartz layers in Quebec, Canada. Many of the most ancient of rocks to be found on earth were found in this region.

An iron bonanza beneath the sea that was also a hydro-thermal outlet allowed earth’s first life forms to survive in relative security and safety. The period in prehistory we are talking about is 3770 to 4300 million years ago.

Thus the theory that life evolved from sweltering seabed outlets has been proven to be correct. It was quite a quick efflorescence of life on earth after its formation. Sedimentary structures formed by small organisms have also been discovered by the scientists.

Previously, the most ancient of micro-fossils were found in Australia. They were 3460 years old. Scientists thought at the beginning that they were not biological.

Yet with the passage of time this misconception was rectified. Similarly, the researchers had to go through the lengthy procedure of assurance whether the fossils found in Canada were life forms or had nothing whatsoever to do with life.

The tubules and cilia were composed of haematite. This is iron oxide or what in ordinary language is called rust. While the idea that these could have originated from non-life was entertained for awhile, it was dismissed after careful analysis.

These haematite forms have the same traits as iron-oxidizing bacteria. The latter are found near vents that also have graphite and apatite not to mention carbonate in them.

These are a part of bones and teeth as well as fossils. Also tubules and cilia were found in nodules or concretions by the experts. Even rosettes and granules contained them.

These bacteria may be a result of putrid matter undergoing further decay. Life on earth probably came into being when both earth and Mars had water on them. The Martian surface may have had life forms teeming on it 4000 million years in the past.

The study was published in the journal Nature.</s>Scientists have found evidence that life existed on Earth much earlier than previously thought and they say this discovery has implications for life springing up on other planets, particularly Mars.

Fossils of microscopic bacteria were discovered in Quebec, Canada in the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, a formation which contains some of the oldest sedimentary rocks in the world. Scientists estimate the fossils are at least 3.7 billion years old, and could be as old as 4.28 billion years. This is hundreds of millions of years older than previously found specimens.

“The most exciting thing about this discovery is that we know life managed to get a grip and start on Earth at such an early time in Earth’s evolution, which gives us exciting questions as to whether we are alone in the solar system or in the universe,” said PhD student Matthew Dodd from University College London (UCL), who is the first author on a new paper about the finding in the journal Nature. “If life happened so quickly on Earth then could we expect it to be a simple process and start on other planets, or was Earth really just a special case?”

The tiny fossils are the remains of microorganisms that are smaller than the width of a human hair. The Nuvvuagittuq rocks are thought to have formed in an iron-rich deep-sea hydrothermal vent system that provided a habitat for Earth’s first life forms. These rocks are mostly composed of silica and hematite.

“Our discovery supports the idea that life emerged from hot, seafloor vents shortly after planet Earth formed,” Dodd said in a press release. “This speedy appearance of life on Earth fits with other evidence of recently discovered 3,700 million year old sedimentary mounds that were shaped by microorganisms.”

Prior to this discovery, the oldest microfossils reported were found in Western Australia and were dated at 3.4 billion years old, leading scientists to speculate that life probably started around 3.7 billion years ago. But the new finding suggests that life existed as early as 4.5 billion years ago, just 100 million years after Earth formed.

“The microfossils we discovered are about 300 million years older than the previously thought oldest microfossils,” said Dr. Dominic Papineau, a professor of geochemistry and astrobiology at UCL, “so they are within a few hundred million years from within the accretion of the solar system and the planet Earth and the Sun and the Moon and so on.”

Papineau said the structures in the rocks that contained the fossils were spheroids, and since they are made of hematite, they are reminiscent of the discovery in 2004 by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity of beds of rounded hematite concretions, that MER scientists called “blueberries.” These rounded concretions formed on Earth when significant volumes of groundwater flowed through permeable rock, and chemical reactions triggered minerals to precipitate and start forming a layered, spherical ball.

The concretions may bear on the search for evidence of past life on Mars because bacteria on Earth can make concretions form more quickly, according to previous research.

“The origin of this structure is not fully understood even on Earth where we find them,” Papineau said. “We don’t know really how organic matter can potentially be involved in making these structures.”

Both the MER rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, as well as the Curiosity rover have all found evidence of past water on Mars. In addition, Curiosity has identified traces of elements like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and more — the basic building blocks of life. It also found sulfur compounds in different chemical forms, a possible energy source for microbes. If Mars really was warmer and wetter in the past, as the evidence seems to point, Mars would have been the perfect spot for living organisms.

While the finding of ancient fossils on Earth doesn’t necessarily mean there is past or present life on Mars, in conjunction with the Curiosity rover finding of the raw ingredients for life, it is enticing to know that the environment on early Mars was likely very similar to early Earth, where life did spring up.

You can see details and hear the researchers talk about their findings in the video below:

By Nancy Atkinson - 

 Nancy Atkinson is currently Universe Today's Contributing Editor. Previously she served as UT's Senior Editor and lead writer, and has worked with Astronomy Cast and 365 Days of Astronomy. Nancy is the author of the new book "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos." She is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador.</s>Recently discovered “microfossils” in Canada are the oldest ever found on Earth and could show life on the planet more than four billion years ago, according to a new study in the journal Nature.

Scientists were not able to pinpoint the exact time frame when the fossils were formed they could be up to 4.3 billion years old but even at the lower end of the estimate, the fossils are at least 3.8 billion years old, making them “about 300 million years older” than any other fossils found to date, said Dominic Papineau, a professor at University College London who made the discovery.

The fossils are tiny, at about half the width of a human hair, and invisible to the human eye. Scientists say they came from ancient microbes that formed near warm-water vents on the ocean floor.

“Our discovery supports the idea that life emerged from hot, seafloor vents shortly after planet Earth formed,” study author Matthew Dodd said. “This speedy appearance of life on Earth fits with other evidence of recently discovered 3,700 million-year-old sedimentary mounds that were shaped by microorganisms.”

Dodd noted that the discovery of life on Earth not long after the planet's formation believed to be about 4.57 billion years ago means it's possible life could have formed on other watery planets in a similarly short amount of time.

“We could expect to find evidence for past life on Mars four billion years ago,” he said.

The site where the fossils were discovered, which is known as the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt and located in northern Quebec, is also home to some of the oldest sedimentary rocks on earth.

Prior to this recent discovery, the oldest known fossil came out of Western Australia and was estimated at about 3.46 billion years old.</s>A team of international scientists has found the oldest record of life on Earth in Northern Quebec, dating back at least 3.8 billion years.

Our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists believe that about 4.3 billion years ago, water already existed at the surface. However, what isn't known is when the earliest life emerged. Recent research has found life at 3.4 billion years and, most recently 3.7 billion years.

The discovery was made in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Northern Quebec in rock known as "banded iron formations." These formations existed billions of years ago, a result of organisms reacting with dissolved iron in the water that covered the planet. They appear in rock as red or white layers.

While there is some debate as to whether or not the the age of the rock in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt is 3.8 billion years old or 4.3 billion years old, Jonathan O'Neill, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, believes it to be on the older side. But even if the rock is younger than that, it would still make their finding the oldest record of life on Earth, by 100 million years.

"It's impressive," O'Neill said. "We now have evidence in rock that I can hold in my hand that we had life already established extremely early on the Earth."

Discoveries such as this one greatly help scientists better understand the early Earth. O'Neill said that scientists had previously theorized that Earth was a truly inhospitable place at this young geological age, a searing, active world with molten lava lakes incapable of supporting any surface water or life. However, O'Neill said that recent research is painting a far different picture.

"Within the last 15, 20 years, we have more and more evidence that that's not the case," he said. "Very quickly after its formation, the Earth became closer to what it is today. We already have evidence of water at the surface of the Earth by about 4.3 billion years ago."

And it's in that water, together with thermal activity below where life began to flourish, first as microorganisms.

Below the surface water, the ocean crust would have been literally bubbling with activity: with hydrothermal vents, the water heated by volcanic activity.

"There's a lot of hot water circulating through these rocks that are full of elements, full of minerals … we think this is the ideal environment where life could have started on Earth. You have the perfect conditions for life to start."

Today, that process continues in deep parts of our oceans.

The rocks found in Quebec, reveal tiny, tubular structures of hematite. Hematite, a type of iron oxide, is one of the most common minerals on Earth.

These structures could also have been created by temperature and pressure rather than organisms. However, upon closer examination, the research team discovered the structures were similar to those found at thermal vents today. As well, they were found together with other minerals that are found in biological matter.

The researchers hope that this finding could also help in the search for life on other planets.

"These discoveries demonstrate life developed on Earth at a time when Mars and Earth had liquid water at their surfaces, posing exciting questions for extra-terrestrial life," Michael Dodd of University College London and first author of the paper published in Nature said. "Therefore, we expect to find evidence for past life on Mars 4,000 million years ago, or if not, Earth may have been a special exception."</s>The oldest known signs of life on Earth have been found in northern Quebec, buried in a sheet of potentially 4.3 billion-year-old bedrock that once formed the bottom of the planet's first ocean.

An international team of scientists found fossilized traces of bacteria in iron ore samples taken from the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt, a rare surviving chunk of the planet's early crust now situated at the northern tip of Quebec. The discovery pushes the scientific timeline for life on Earth back by 100-600 million years, to an era when the no longer molten-hot planet was covered by shallow oceans and dotted by volcanic islands.

Study co-author Jonathan O'Neil, of the University of Ottawa, says the fossilized remains are the "oldest record of life on Earth," and could offer clues about the emergence of life on our planet and others.

The fossilized remains were found near what's thought to have once been a hydrothermal vent, where swirling heat, chemicals and minerals may have given rise to the first single-celled organisms.

"We're not talking about these complex forms of life on the early Earth, but this is where we think it actually happened," O'Neil told CTVNews.ca by phone on Wednesday. He added that the discovery may make it easier to find life on other planets, because it demonstrates that ancient sea floors are prime spots for finding the early signs of life.

"The ingredients are all there," he said. "This is the kind of place you would want to look for when you're trying to find the traces of life."

O'Neil and his colleagues estimate the fossils are approximately 4.3 billion years old, based on techniques used to measure the age of ancient space rocks. He says this more unorthodox technique was necessary for measuring the rock's age, because rocks from the Earth's infancy do not contain the mineral zircon, which is typically used to determine age.

"If we want to come to the parent of these rocks… the very primordial crust, zircons are not useful," he said. "It was the first time that we've used that (measurement) on Earth, simply because no rocks were old enough before that."

He added that bands of zircon mixed into the sample, which would have likely formed later from melted bedrock, were determined to be at least 3.8 billion years old.

The study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Earth formed nearly 4.6 billion years ago as a molten ball of rock and gas, around the same time as the birth of the sun. Sometime in those early years it's believed another large chunk of space rock slammed into the planet and rebounded into orbit, where it eventually became the moon. The Earth started cooling down after that impact, with the magma-covered surface hardening into the planet's first crust.

The Earth's surface has changed dramatically over its nearly 4.6 billion-year history, and few traces of the original surface remain.

O'Neil says the oldest known rocks in the world are now at the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Quebec. Only one object is thought to be older, and that's a 4.4 billion-year-old grain of zircon found in Australia.

In terms of the search for life on other planets, O'Neil says it might be hard to analyze a rock sample from the recently-discovered planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, 39 light-years away. However, he says it should help narrow down the search for life on Mars to regions where water once covered the planet's surface.

"Instead of searching the whole planet of Mars, you can target these specific areas," he said, adding that Earth and Mars were "probably very similar" 4.3 billion years ago.

"I wouldn't be surprised to have these type of environments preserved on Mars as well," he said. "This is where life started on Earth… so let's look for them on Mars."</s>Ancient rocks in northwestern Canada may contain the oldest evidence of life on Earth.

Scientists have discovered remains of microorganisms that likely thrived around 3.8 billion years ago near volcanic vents on the seafloor, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.

Iron-dwelling bacteria left behind tiny, rusty filaments and tubes, which were found encased in layers of quartz in the Nuvvuagittuq supracrustal belt near Quebec.

"The fact we unearthed them from one of the oldest-known rock formations suggests we've found direct evidence of one of Earth's oldest life forms," Dominic Papineau, the study lead and a lecturer at University College London (UCL)'s Earth Sciences department, said in a press release.

"This discovery helps us piece together the history of our planet and the remarkable life on it, and will help to identify traces of life elsewhere in the universe," he said. Most likely, that means searching for evidence of life on Mars.

Prior to this study, the oldest known microfossils were found in western Australia and dated at around 3.5 billion years ago. Scientists also uncovered a set of 3.7 billion-year-old microbial remains found in Greenland, although the evidence for life in the Arctic formations is not nearly as solid as that found in Australia.

Scientists from Canada, the U.K., the United States, Norway and Australia teamed up on the Canadian fossil study.

They searched for fossil evidence in the Nuvvuagittuq belt because it contains some of the Earth's oldest known sedimentary rocks, which were likely formed by deep-sea hydrothermal vents that spewed out scalding water laden with minerals, including iron.

These vents may have hosted bacterial life between 3.8 billion and 4.3 billion years ago, not long after the Earth formed.

Scientific evidence suggests our planet had liquid water at its surface around this time — and possibly so did Mars.

The fact that bacterial life was gushing from deep-sea vents in Earth's earliest years suggests the same might've been happening on the red planet, said Matthew Dodd, a doctoral student at the London Center for Nanotechnology and the study's first author.

The fossil find in Canada poses "exciting questions for extra-terrestrial life," he said in the press release. "We expect to find evidence for past life on Mars [4 billion] years ago, or if not, Earth may have been a special exception."
Scientists announce the finding of microfossils up to almost 4.3 billion years old, within rocks from the Hudson Bay shoreline in northern Quebec, Canada, that may represent the oldest-known evidence of life on Earth.