Close but not quite right
Stan Awramik found fossils of 3.5 billion year old Stromatolites in the Kimberly.
At Shark Bay LIVING examples of this ancient life form were found.
How amazing is Australia.
Stromatolites are rather like corals in that all of their life is on the surface and that most of what you are looking at is the dead mass of earlier generations. If you peer, you can sometimes see tiny bubbles of oxygen rising in streams from the formations. This is the stromatolites only trick and it isnt much, but it is what made life as we know it possible. The bubbles are produced by primitive algaelike microorganisms called cyanobacteria, which live on the surface of the rocksabout 3 billion of them to the square yard, to save you countingeach of them capturing a molecule of carbon dioxide and a tiny beat of energy from the sun and combining them to fuel its unimaginably modest ambitions to exist, to live. The by-product of this very simple process is the faintest puff of oxygen. But get enough stromatolites respiring away over a long enough period, and you can change the world. For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percentenough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real
