ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Geological alteration of Precambrian steroids mimics early animal signatures.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Chemical characterization of CProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Ecosystem relocation on Snowball Earth: Polar-alpine ancestry of the extant surface biosphere?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Sterol methyltransferases in uncultured bacteria complicate eukaryotic biomarker interpretations.Nature communications · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The absence of unambiguous animal body fossils in rocks older than the late Ediacaran has rendered fossil lipids the most promising tracers of early organismic complexity. Yet much debate surrounds the various potential biological sources of putative metazoan steroids found in Precambrian rocks. Here we show that 26-methylated steranes-hydrocarbon structures currently attributed to the earliest animals-can form via geological alteration of common algal sterols, which carries important implications for palaeo-ecological interpretations and inhibits the use of such unconventional 'sponge' steranes for reconstructing early animal evolution.
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