The Oldest Color Ever Discovered is 1.1 Billion Years Old

Scientists discovered oldest colours in geological record, 1.1 billion-year-old bright pink pigments extracted from rocks deep beneath Sahara desert in Africa. Pigments taken from marine black shales of Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa, were more than half billion years older than previous pigment discoveries.

The Oldest Color Ever Discovered is 1.1 Billion Years Old
  • Bright pink pigments are molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting ancient ocean that has long since vanished.
  • Fossils range from blood red to deep purple in their concentrated form, & bright pink when diluted, according to study published in journal PNAS.
  • Researchers crushed billion-year-old rocks to powder, before extracting & analyzing molecules of ancient organisms from them.
  • Precise analysis of ancient pigments confirmed that tiny cyanobacteria dominated base of food chain in oceans billion years ago, which helps to explain why animals did not exist at time.
  • Emergence of large, active organisms was likely to be restrained by limited supply of larger food particles, such as algae, senior lead researcher Jochen Brocks, associate professor at ANU.
  • Algae, still microscopic, was 1000 times larger in volume than cyanobacteria, & are much richer food source. Cyanobacterial oceans started to vanish about 650 million years ago, when algae began to rapidly spread to provide burst of energy needed for evolution of complex ecosystems, where large animals, including humans, could thrive on Earth.

Examrace Team at Aug 23, 2021