The study conducted by the researchers from McGill University in Canada, revealed that the process of photosynthesis in plants first took place 1.25 billion years ago. Earlier estimates had placed it somewhere between 720 million and 1.2 billion years.
-The study is based on an algae fossil, believed to be the world’s oldest known direct ancestor of modern plants and animals. The study could resolve a long-standing mystery over the age of the fossilised algae — Bangiomorpha pubescens — which were first discovered in rocks in Arctic Canada in 1990.
-To pinpoint the microscopic organism’s exact age, collected samples of black shale from rock layers that sandwiched the rock unit containing fossils of the Bangiomorpha pubescens, from the rugged area of remote Baffin Island.
-Using a dating technique applied increasingly to sedimentary rocks, they determined that the rocks are 1.047 billion years old.
-This will enable scientists to make more precise assessments of the early evolution of eukaryotes, the celled organisms that include plants and animals.
-The scientists also established that the chloroplast, the structure in plant cells that is the site of photosynthesis, was created when a eukaryote long ago engulfed a simple bacterium that was photosynthetic.
-The eukaryote then managed to pass that DNA along to its descendants, including the plants and trees that produce most of the world’s biomass.
