“Hairy Blobs” Discovered in Acidic Lake Could Have Evolved on Mars

At last , scientists have find a pattern of animation that could have evolve on Mars . geologist unearth a treasure treasure trove of ossified stiff in a piquant , acidulent lake in remote Australia — the creatures , credibly about 250 million yr old , were , allot to New Scientist , “ made up of a mix of inorganic crystals and ‘ hairs ’ deposit together in a batch ” ( pictured ) . The lake where they lived was filled with water whose extreme levels of salinity and sour are a skinny - match for Martian water . receive out more , plus see more nerveless picture of the blobs , below .

According to New Scientist :

Kathleen Benison , a geologist at Central Michigan University , Mount Pleasant , guide a squad that studied the sediments take shape by acidic and very salty lake in modern daylight Western Australia , and those deposit around 250 million year ago in North Dakota . It is very difficult to survive in such a knotty environs and few signs of life have ever been found in these sorts of lakes .

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Inside the halite and gypsum “ evaporate ” minerals , which form as the lake waters dry up , Benison and co-worker institute antecedently unknown fossilised blobs at both the advanced and ancient sites , set out in size from 0.05 to 1.5 millimetres . They were made up of a mix of inorganic watch glass and “ hairs ” stuck together in a mass ( pictured ) . They bring up them hairy blobs .

The team argues that each hair was in fact a separate microorganism because the hairsbreadth fossils are made of disquiet black lead which , unlike inorganic plumbago , has irregular layers that suggest it was once a live being ..

Many of the hair are coat with crystals of gypsum , a calcium sulphate mineral . This contact with gypsum suggests that the microorganism were fuel by chemical interactions with atomic number 16 in the acid water – which helped the gypsum to form .

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scientist are still separate on whether these crystal - hair creatures actually count as “ animation . ” As they lean further tests on the fossils , the simple universe of such creature fuel hope among astrobiologists that life sentence could indeed have evolved on Mars and we might get a opportunity to meet it — or at least , to find its fossilized remains . Images from Benison ’s publish paper in Astrobiology .

Hairy Blobs Found in Acidic Hell[via Eurekalert andNew Scientist ]

See full text of Benison ’s articlehere(just gyre down ) .

Lesdilley