Scientists Discover the 'Lost World' in Rocks Over 1.6 Billion Years Old

Fossilized remnants of cellular membranes identified in rocks approximately 1.6 billion years old have brought scientists closer to understanding what they call the 'Lost World' of microscopic organisms. Researchers, who published their findings in the journal 'Nature', state that these ancient marine fossils represent the first known predators on Earth. The newly identified fossils are of a primitive form of a steroid; a fat molecule that was an essential component of the cell membranes of eukaryotes. Eukaryotes have complex cellular structures that include a nucleus, which acts as a control center, and intracellular structures called mitochondria that power the cell. Modern eukaryotes include fungi, algae, plants, and animals. The newly discovered fossils do not include the bodies of these organisms, only their molecular remnants, leaving their size, appearance, behavior, and complexity, including whether they were all unicellular, uncertain. Benjamin Netrashaim, one of the authors of this research from the University of Bremen in Germany, told Reuters that despite their small size, they may have included predators that hunted smaller bacteria or even other eukaryotes. Modern forms of eukaryotes are so powerful and dominant that researchers believed they must have been conquering the oceans over a billion years ago. Scientists have long sought fossilized evidence of these early eukaryotes, but their physical remains have been extremely rare. Scientists chose the name 'Lost World' because, although they had a vast world, they were not rare and lived for hundreds of millions of years, yet were not visible or identifiable. Their extinction paved the way for the formation of modern eukaryotic forms about 800 million years ago. The 'Lost World' is also referred to as such because they are now completely extinct. Until now, it was thought that eukaryotes were rare or limited to specific habitats like shores or rivers, but fossil steroid molecules trapped in sedimentary rocks in ancient sea beds indicate that they were surprisingly abundant. The oldest rocks containing these fossils were discovered in a remote area in northern Australia, near Darwin. Conrad Bloch, a German scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1964 and passed away in 2000, had hypothesized that early eukaryotes produced such steroids but was skeptical about their discovery. One of the researchers in this study told Reuters, 'I wish I could tell him that we found them.'