Billion Year old Stromatolites

By Anupum Pant

Billions of years ago, yes, with a ‘B’, just about when life had started on earth, some very interesting kinds of fossils started forming which can be found even today.

Mats of algae which had mud trapped in them layered over one another and over time formed into a hard fossil which we see several Billion years later. Some of these fossils can be as old as 3.5 billion years. These rock like fossil structures give us a peek into the far past when the earliest organisms started forming.

In  1999 in Western Australia, near the town of Marble Bar, the oldest one of these was found and was about 3.46 billion years old..

incredible-complete-cambrian-stromatolite-head-found-near-roanoke-virginia-the-boxley-stromatolite-720x340As rare as these may sound, the fragments of stromatolites are in fact not that hard to find. But the intact heads like the on in this image are extremely rare.

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