India keeps making headlines for outstanding pre-historic findings and this time a scientist has found two billion-year-old microfossils. Naresh Ghose, the geologist from India's southern city Bangalore, has found the microfossils and claimed that it belongs to earth's oldest-known form of life.
During Geological Congress in Nagpur, Ghose announced that he found the prokaryotic fossils from the Gwalior basin of the Bundelkhand region near Jhansi, which is a historic city situated in India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
Microfossils are smaller than 1mm in size and usually found in rocks and sediment. These are actually remains of bacteria, fungi, animals, and planktons, which require microscopes to study them.
The former professor of Patna University, Ghose said that the shape and distribution of the occurrences of the microfossils in carbonaceous material, strongly support the debris to be that of a micro-organism.
"The present study reports for the first time the presence of 'organogenic' microfossils --- derived from living organisms -- in black shale immediately underlying the volcanic rock of the Gwalior basin," said Ghose.
"Therefore, the microfossils (Prokaryotic-RNA cell) in the Gwalior basin may be regarded as the confirmed oldest existence of life dated about 2,000 million years ago ever to be recorded from the Indian subcontinent," he further added.
During the discovery of the microfossils, Ghose was studying sections of sediment, which contained a mixture of siliceous black shale, with fine layers of limestone and particles of river-borne and volcanic origin.
The Indian scientist also said that "this important discovery was made using a simple and inexpensive device like a microscope without the aid of any sophisticated instrument," which will help to encourage his fellow citizen, who are willing to discover something new but couldn't execute because of the financial issue.
Earlier this month in India's northern region Uttarakhand, a mysterious fossil was discovered which looked like a T-Rex but local authorities did not confirm whether it was a dinosaur or not.
Even in October, a study led by a group of researchers from KSKV Kutch University had discovered a fossilized skeleton of a creature from Jurassic era. Guntupalli Prasad from the University of Delhi, India, and other researchers have published a study where they stated that 5.5m long fossil, most probably connected to Ophthalmosauridae family was found in the Kachchh area in Gujarat, India.
