A rock the size of a fist was found in Quebec and it may hold answers to when life on Earth began. On Wednesday, a new study was published in the journal Nature and suggested that tiny filaments, knobs and tubes found in the rock were created by bacteria around 300 million years before the widely accepted date of the first sign of life on Earth.
Researchers from the University College London (UCL) wrote the paper and estimated the rock to be between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years old. When the rock was found, some scientists disagreed that structures found inside the rock were biological in nature and is not a sign of early life.
After slicing the rock into sections about as this as paper, they were abv to determine the estimated age of the rock. The rock contained rare earth elements in its composition that were at the same levels as other ancient rock specimens of a similar age. They used a supercomputer to create 3D models of the rock’s structures.
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