Word: barghoorn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Harvard paleontologist Elso S. Barghoorn liberated a prehistoric algae from the rock prison it had been locked in for the past 3.5 billion years. The freed algae had no immediate words for the press, although Barghoon claims it is the oldest form of life anyone has ever seen...
Then how and when did free oxygen begin appearing in the atmosphere? A clue to the answer has been found in the incredibly old sedimentary rocks of South Africa's eastern Transvaal by Harvard's Elso Barghoorn and Andrew Knoll, now with the Oberlin College department of geology. To the naked eye, the 3.5 billion-year-old rocks Barghoorn and Knoll collected during a visit last year revealed no traces of early life. But the scientists soon uncovered the stones' secrets. Returning to Harvard with samples of the rock, the pair used a diamond cutter...
...Barghoorn and Knoll believe that their primitive fossils-the oldest direct evidence of terrestrial life-are the ancestors of modern blue-green algae or photosynthetic bacteria, both of which convert carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. If they are correct, these organisms 3.5 billion years ago were already pumping into the atmosphere the oxygen upon which most of today's terrestrial life now depends...
...Barghoorn said Mars seems to be the only body other than Earth in the solar system which could support life. But some scientists have recently suggested that life might exist on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, because it has a dense atmosphere...
...mission so far has lived up to the best expectations, Barghoorn said. Problems have occurred with the seismometer which was intended to measure tremors and volcanic activity on Mars...