Scientists have unearthed the world’s oldest colors, or pigments, from deep beneath the Sahara.
July 9 (UPI) — Scientists have unearthed the world’s oldest colors, or pigments, from deep beneath the Sahara.
Researchers found 1.1 million-year-old pink pigments inside ancient rocks dredged from beneath Africa’s Great Desert. The colors are more than 500 million years older than the next oldest pigments.
« The bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting an ancient ocean that has long since vanished, » Nur Gueneli, an earth scientist at Australia National University, said in a news release .
When diluted, the pigments appear a light pink. When concentrated inside ancient marine shales, the pigments take on a variety of tints, from blood red to deep purple.
Scientists were able to extract the pigment molecules from the ancient rocks after grinding the basalts into a powder.
« The precise analysis of the ancient pigments confirmed that tiny cyanobacteria dominated the base of the food chain in the oceans a billion years ago, which helps to explain why animals did not exist at the time, » Gueneli said.
Researchers described their discovery of ancient pigments in the journal PNAS .
