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The Fossil Record: Tracing the Roots of the Cyanobacterial Lineage

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The Ecology of Cyanobacteria

Summary

Since the mid-1960s, following a century of unrewarded search, impressive progress has been made toward deciphering the Precambrian fossil record, evidence of life extant during the earliest seven-eighths of geologic time. Hundreds of fossiliferous units have been discovered containing thousands of microbial fossils—dominantly but not exclusively cyanobacterial — and the documented antiquity of life has been extended to an age roughly three-quarters that of the Earth. Mutually reinforcing lines of evidence, paleontological, geological, and isotopic geochemical, indicate that stromatoliticmicrobial ecosystems,evidently including cyanobacteria and other members of the bacterial domain, were extant ~3500 Ma ago; methanogenic archaeans by ~2800 Ma ago; and Gram-negative sulfate-reducing bacteria at least as early as ~2700 Ma ago.The discrepancy between these dates and those suggested for emergence of these groups by a recently proposed amino acid-based “molecular clock” is too great and too consistent to be ignored. The challengeis to unify the molecular data with the increasingly well-established paleobiologicrecord.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution, University of California, Los Angeles, California, 90095-1567, USA

    J. William Schopf

  2. Origin of Life Department of Earth and Space Sciences, and Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California, 90095-1567, USA

    J. William Schopf

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  1. J. William Schopf
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  1. University of Durham, Durham, England

    Brian A. Whitton

  2. Virginia Tech., Blackburg, USA

    Malcolm Potts

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Schopf, J.W. (2000). The Fossil Record: Tracing the Roots of the Cyanobacterial Lineage. In: Whitton, B.A., Potts, M. (eds) The Ecology of Cyanobacteria. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-46855-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-46855-7_2

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