Virginia Tech paleontologists have made a remarkable discovery in China. They discovered 1 billion-year-old micro-fossils of green seaweeds that could be related to the ancestor of the earliest land plants and trees that first developed 450 million years ago.
The micro-fossil seaweeds — a form of algae known as Proterocladus antiquus — are barely visible to the naked eye at 2 millimeters in length, or roughly the size of a typical flea. The fossils are the oldest green seaweeds ever found. They were imprinted in rock taken from an area of dry land — formerly ocean — near the city of Dalian in northern China. Previously, the earliest convincing fossil record of green seaweeds were found in rock dated at roughly 800 million years old.
The findings are featured in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. These new fossils suggest that green seaweeds were important players in the ocean long before their land-plant descendants moved and took control of dry land.
Credit: Dinghua Yang
The entire biosphere is largely dependent on plants and algae for food and oxygen, yet land plants did not evolve until about 450 million years ago. This study shows that green seaweeds evolved no later than 1 billion years ago, pushing back the record of green seaweeds by about 200 million years.
News Source: Eurekalert
