The 558 Million Year Old Fat Molecules

Tuur said:

Stumbled across this today:

"This fossil is one of the world's earliest animals, according to fat molecules preserved for half a billion years."

See: https://www.science.org/content/art...ccording-fat-molecules-preserved-half-billion

The article is from 2018, so it's, ah, old info. But notice the reference to 93% of the organic molecules had 27 carbon atoms, making them members of the same group that cholesterol is in. This, from the article, indicates there were animal cells.

Okay, so any molecule with carbon atoms falls within the domain of organic chemistry. We're still talking about molecules surviving for 558 million years. That's almost incredible. Would have thought it would have broken down long before now.

Click to expand...

Bradskii said:

We're talking organic chemistry here, so it's not like there were bits of bone or skin. Organic material has been found in meteorites, which are incredibly old. The Taglish Lake meteorite is about 4.5 billion years old.

'The first analysis of the soluble organic material in a pristine sample of the Tagish Lake meteorite was performed by Pizzarello et al.' https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/maps.12272

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Tuur said:

Stumbled across this today:

"This fossil is one of the world's earliest animals, according to fat molecules preserved for half a billion years."

See: https://www.science.org/content/art...ccording-fat-molecules-preserved-half-billion

The article is from 2018, so it's, ah, old info. But notice the reference to 93% of the organic molecules had 27 carbon atoms, making them members of the same group that cholesterol is in. This, from the article, indicates there were animal cells.

Okay, so any molecule with carbon atoms falls within the domain of organic chemistry. We're still talking about molecules surviving for 558 million years. That's almost incredible. Would have thought it would have broken down long before now.

Click to expand...