Re: Archaeosphaeroides barbertonensis

[Gautam Majumdar <gmajumdar@freeuk.com>]

On Sunday 08 Aug 2004 22:44, VladimÃr  Socha wrote:
> Good day!
> Recently, I've found a brief mention of this "fossil" in one of my
> books. It states that this is the earliest organism ever to have
> existed as it is about 3.8 billion years old. It was found in south
> Africa. No more info in the book. I suppose it's not valid or even
> not of organic origin. Thank you for any comments. VS
>
Original description :

        Lopuchin and Moralev 1973. Izv. Zysshikh. Ucheb. Zaved. Geol. Raz. 
        7:185-187 (Russian)

This is later shown to be geological artifact

        Schopf and Prasad 1978. Precambrian Res. 6:347-366

Though some people still believe that it was the oldest eukaryote

        see :  http://www2.canisius.edu/~dehn/adaptrad.html  

        Fig Tree Shale: 3.2 bya
        First photosynthetic autotroph â bluegreen algae (Archaeosphaeroides  
        barbertonenis). Prior to that primitive photosynthetic systems linked 
        to ATP synthesis used H2S instead of H2O so end-product was not O2 

See also  for a review of the claimed early fossils:  

        http://www.cavescience.com/geomicro__article.htm

-- 

Gautam Majumdar

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