KinneyiaThis is a particularly neat and common variety of trace fossil, thought to be a common remna

KinneyiaThis is a particularly neat and common variety of trace fossil, thought to be a common remnant texture of the time before multicellular life arose. Biofilms or microbial mats are one of the main ways that single celled life forms grow on Earth. They can be found in all sorts of environments today, such as tidal flats, the ocean floor near hydrothermal vents, and near hot springs. They grow layer by layer, with single cells anchored together by polymers produced by the bacteria, archaea, algae, and fungi that make them up. They are some of the oldest fossils on Earth, with evidence of their presence going back at least 3 billion years and possibly longer in disputed samples.This texture of a folded up surface is a trace fossil of a microbial mat. This particular one comes from some of the ancient rocks found in the southern portions of Africa (either Namibia or South Africa), where there are sedimentary layers going back to the Archaean, the time before oxygen arose in Earth’s atmosphere.This surface was produced and held together by the microbial mat, and once it was buried the texture was preserved in the rock for several billion years. A recent paper suggested that this texture forms much like kelvin-helmholtz waves form in the atmosphere – a current moving over the mat becomes turbulent as it finds small undulations in the surface of the mat. This turbulence makes the mat’s surface grow into this wavy texture over time, building up in some spots and sitting down low in others.-JBBImage credit:https://flic.kr/p/bVMKwyReferences: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmats.2016.00030/fullhttps://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-47226-1_12 -- source link

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