Paleontology: China fossil discovery pushes date of seaweed back to 1B years ago

Inverse said:

Paleontologists announced on Monday the discovery of a billion-year-old green seaweed fossil, evidence of something way older than land-based plants, an ancestor to everything that grows on Earth.

In a study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution , researchers from Virginia Tech write that the seaweed, Proterocladus antiquus, is likely the ancestor of the very first land-based plants and trees on Earth, which showed up around 450 million years ago.

Scientists found this seaweed microfossil in a rock near the city of Dailan in northern China, and the seaweeds are tiny, at around 2 millimeters long. Despite their size, these early algae may have paved the way for the earliest plant species to evolve 650 million years later.

Surprisingly, the microfossils reveal that these ancient weeds closely resemble a group of modern green seaweeds, known siphonocladaleans, which are roughly the same size and shape as the fossilized algae.

They also reveal some sketchy details of Earth a billion years back. These seaweeds likely lived in a shallow ocean, before they died and “cooked” under layers of rock, the researchers say. That land is dry today, allowing researchers to dig in and gather the well-preserved fossilized samples.

"These new fossils suggest that green SEAWEEDS WERE IMPORTANT PLAYERS IN THE OCEAN long before their land-plant descendants moved and took control of dry land," Shuhai Xiao, professor at Virginia Tech and co-author of the new paper, said in a statement.

Previously, the oldest green seaweed fossil discovery dated back a mere 800 million years, but the age of the new fossils COMPLETELY REWRITES THE STORY of how and when the Earth's flora evolved.

"Our study tells us that the ubiquitous green plants we see today can be traced back to at least 1 billion years," Xiao said.

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Friendly Frog said:

I probably am missing something, but I thought it had already been established that water-living plants would have predated land-based plants? But the article in Dutch that I read kept harping on the fact that it was older than land-based plants so now I'm confused.

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