Deep-Sea Microorganism Hasn't Evolved For Over 2 Billion Years

sfcrazy writes: Evolution is a natural process — everything evolves over a period of time, depending on the environment. But now scientists have discovered an organism which hasn't evolved for over more than 2 billion years. That's almost the half of the life of the Earth. "The scientists examined sulfur bacteria (abstract), microorganisms that are too small to see with the unaided eye, that are 1.8 billion years old and were preserved in rocks from Western Australia’s coastal waters. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the bacteria look the same as bacteria of the same region from 2.3 billion years ago — and that both sets of ancient bacteria are indistinguishable from modern sulfur bacteria found in mud off of the coast of Chile." Scientists say the extreme stability of the environment around the organisms made further adaptations unnecessary.

Comments

Earth has only existed for six thousand years.

[mmell]

Ask a WASP.

Re:Plenty of other creatures haven't "evolved"

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Republicans haven't evolved at all.

Re:uhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

By all means, inform these "lazy scientists" of the methodology you would use to extract DNA from fossils, and then they would have noexcuse for not doing propoer reseach, instead of just looking at the shapes, colours and contours.

What's that you say? You don't have a methodology for extracting DNA from the fossils of bacteria? STFU then.