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Early life

Ancient acritarchs

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Big and beautiful microfossils have been extracted from rocks that are more than 3 billion years old. They offer tantalizing hints about the antiquity of the eukaryote lineage of organisms that includes ourselves.

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Figure 1: Archaean and other acritarchs.

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Buick, R. Ancient acritarchs. Nature 463, 885–886 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/463885a

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