Ancient bacterial mats may have been key to first mobile animals
Monday, May 16, 2011 - 07:30
in Earth & Climate
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from Canada studying the highly salty coastal lagoons at Los Roques, Venezuela and the microbial mats found at the bottom of the sea there, have discovered that oxygen levels in the mats, at least in the day time, are high enough to support the development of mobile life forms. Led by University of Alberta palaeontologist, Murray Gingras, the team writes in Nature Geoscience, that levels of oxygen on the ocean floor were up to four times as high as that near the surface; high enough to support the development of mobile sea life; which the team believes could explain how early life forms could have evolved in waters with high salt concentrations.