ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Earth's earliest and deepest purported fossils may be iron-mineralized chemical gardens.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Methane Production on Mars-Relevant Clay Minerals and Simulant Regolith.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Gypsum Gardens: Self-Assembled Tubular Structures of Calcium Sulfate with Relevance for the Detection of Extraterrestrial Life.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- What the earliest evidence for life tells us about the early evolution of the biosphere.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Gravity-Induced Symmetry Breaking in Chemical Gardens.ACS omega · 2025Article
- Abiotic synthesis of graphitic carbons in the Eoarchean Saglek-Hebron metasedimentary rocks.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Patterns Lead the Way to Far-from-Equilibrium Materials.ACS physical chemistry Au · 2024Review
- Molecular Profiling, Characterization and Antimicrobial Efficacy of Silver Nanoparticles Synthesized fromMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Hybrid organic-inorganic structures trigger the formation of primitive cell-like compartments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Self-Similar Patterns from Abiotic Decarboxylation Metabolism through Chemically Oscillating Reactions: A Prebiotic Model for the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Setting the geological scene for the origin of life and continuing open questions about its emergence.Frontiers in astronomy and space sciences · 2023Article
- Chemical Gardens Mimic Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectra and Morphology of Biogenic Mn Oxides.Astrobiology · 2023Article
- A self-sustaining serpentinization mega-engine feeds the fougerite nanoengines implicated in the emergence of guided metabolism.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Metabolically diverse primordial microbial communities in Earth's oldest seafloor-hydrothermal jasper.Science advances · 2022Article
- Controlled self-assembly of chemical gardens enables fabrication of heterogeneous chemobrionic materials.Communications chemistry · 2021Article
- Cellular remains in a ~3.42-billion-year-old subseafloor hydrothermal environment.Science advances · 2021Article
- An Alternative Approach for Assessing Biogenicity.Astrobiology · 2021Article
- Nanoscale Anatomy of Iron-Silica Self-Organized Membranes: Implications for Prebiotic Chemistry.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2021Article
- Factoring Origin of Life Hypotheses into the Search for Life in the Solar System and Beyond.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
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Abstract
Recognizing fossil microorganisms is essential to the study of life's origin and evolution and to the ongoing search for life on Mars. Purported fossil microbes in ancient rocks include common assemblages of iron-mineral filaments and tubes. Recently, such assemblages have been interpreted to represent Earth's oldest body fossils, Earth's oldest fossil fungi, and Earth's best analogues for fossils that might form in the basaltic Martian subsurface. Many of these putative fossils exhibit hollow circular cross-sections, lifelike (non-crystallographic, constant-thickness, and bifurcate) branching, anastomosis, nestedness within 'sheaths', and other features interpreted as strong evidence for a biological origin, since no abiotic process consistent with the composition of the filaments has been shown to produce these specific lifelike features either in nature or in the laboratory. Here, I show experimentally that abiotic chemical gardening can mimic such purported fossils in both morphology and composition. In particular, chemical gardens meet morphological criteria previously proposed to establish biogenicity, while also producing the precursors to the iron minerals most commonly constitutive of filaments in the rock record. Chemical gardening is likely to occur in nature. Such microstructures should therefore not be assumed to represent fossil microbes without independent corroborating evidence.
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