Fox News: UC geologist's discovery reveals clues of ancient world

Fox News highlighted University of Cincinnati geologist Andrew Czaja's latest discovery of a 2.5-billion-year-old fossil he found in South Africa.

Czaja, an associate professor in UC's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, discussed his discovery of what he believes to be ancient cyanobacteria at the international gathering of the Astrobiology Science Conference in June.

The cyanobacteria Czaja examined lived as much as 200 million years before the Great Oxidation Event, when Earth's atmosphere began to fill with oxygen. Few fossils from this period have been discovered, Czaja said.

Czaja was exploring South Africa when he found an interesting rock called a stromatolite, formed over time by the accretion of layers of bacteria. The stromatolite contained microfossils dating back as far as 2.7 billion years ago.

Czaja told Live Science the cyanobacteria fossils he found were many times bigger than the cyanobacteria found on Earth today.

Czaja is lending his expertise on ancient life on Earth to help NASA find proof of past life on Mars. Czaja served on the NASA advisory board that recommended where on Mars to send the next rover to look for fossils or other evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet.

Featured image on top: UC geology professor Andrew Czaja holds up a microscopic slide containing a thin slice of fossils in his lab. Czaja has been studying some of the world's oldest fossils to understand the origins of life on Earth. Photo/Joseph Fuqua II/UC Creative Services