Eukaryotes: A new timetable of evolution
Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - 21:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
The first single-celled organisms with a nucleus originated more than a billion years later than biogeochemical evidence had previously indicated. In contrast to prokaryotes such as bacteria, eukaryotes have a nucleus. Some researchers thought they had discovered molecular remnants of living organisms in rock samples up to 2.8 billion years old. However, as the current study shows, these molecular traces were introduced by contamination.