Oldest Aussie found, as Birger Rasmussen from the University of Western Australia reports discovery of allegedly 3235 million year old sulphur deposits containing fossil micro organisms. This is 2700 million years older than the previous claim. The fossils, reported in Nature vol. 405, p676 8 June 2000 consist of microscopic filaments embedded deep in rocks near Sulphur Springs in northwest Western Australia. Although this region is now high and dry the rocks are believed to have originally formed around geothermal vents (undersea volcanic eruptions) and to be 3,235 million years old. Many of the filaments lie across layers within the rocks and are similar in size and structure to filament forming bacteria found today.
Editorial Comment: Today’s geothermal vents are host to many bacteria which use sulphurous inorganic matter to make the chemical energy needed to sustain life. They can live in such harsh environments only by carrying out complex chemical processes that are the envy of modern day industrial chemists. All that really has been verified is that from the time these rocks formed, up to the present, filament producing bacteria have not evolved. They have produced their own kind. If the Western Australian fossils have been correctly identified, they are really evidence that complex, fully functioning bacteria have been living on earth from the beginning and have reproduced after their kind ever since, as Genesis says life was created to do. (Ref. bacteria, living fossils, volcano)