Life´s cryptic past

The project will pursue the history of eukaryotic multicellularity in deep time and deep rock.

We have earlier shown how fossils of eukaryotic life may be sought and found in rocks much older than anticipated as well as in deep crustal rocks previously thought to lack eukaryotes. We expect to deepen our understanding of how advanced life forms originated and evolved at depth on Earth.

Fungi have been shown by us to be a major component of the deep biosphere, and can through their remarkable fossil record be traced into the depths of time; we plan to purse this path further through Earth history into the earliest rocks.

Our work will employ stateof-the-art techniques of microanalysis and imaging to assess the age and biogenicity of the fossil material and to investigate their morphological and chemical characteristics.

The project involve a novel approach to date individual fossils by radiogenic isotopes, and we endeavour to hone such data to recalibrate the molecular-clock data for the early part of life’s history.

The environmental and ecological conditions in the deep and early environments are largely unknown, and we will pursue these aspects with a special focus on how the nature of the endolithic habitats influenced development of early eukaryotes.

The ultimate goal of the project is to generate an understanding of how Earth’s surface and deep biosphere interact through geological time and what respective roles they play as evolutionary drivers.