In rocks of late Paleoproterozoic and Mesoproterozoic age (ca. 1700-1000 million years ago), probable eukaryotic microfossils are widespread and well preserved, but assemblage and global diversities are low and turnover is slow. Near the Mesoproterozoic-Neoproterozoic boundary (1000 million years ago), red, green, and chromophytic algae diversified; molecular phylogenies suggest that this was p...

Sudan is a large country with an area of 1.88 million Km2, and has the second largest animal population in Africa consisting of 52.08 million sheep, 43.44 million goats, 41.76 million cattle and 4.62 million camels (MARF, 2013). The majority of animal wealth is concentrated in western Sudan (40%), followed by central Sudan (23%) (MARF, 2011). Minerals are divided into two groups, macro-minerals...

Prof. Xiao’s current research focuses on the biological evolution and environmental changes in the Proterozoic Eon (2500 to 543 million years ago). He has been working on some of the most important and exquisitely preserved microfossils from the ca. 600-million-year-old Doushantuo Formation in South China. These microfossils include multicellular red algae and animal embryos at successive cleav...

Microfossils are very important in order to establish terrain correlations, allowing to determinate the age of geological layers with a high grade of accuracy. They are also the fund of any micropaleontological studies. Actual techniques used to extract microfossils are manual, and require of a high amount of time and human resources. This fact make interesting the study of other more complex t...

Microfossils resembling fecal pellets occur in acid-resistant residues and thin sections of Middle Cambrian to Early Proterozoic shale. The cylindrical microfossils average 50 x 110 mum and are the size and shape of fecal pellets produced by microscopic animals today. Pellets occur in dark gray and black rocks that were deposited in the facies that also preserves sulfide minerals and that repre...

If life ever appeared on Mars, could we find traces of primitive life embedded in sedimentary meteorites? To answer this question, a 3.5-byr-old volcanic sediment containing microfossils was embedded in the heat shield of a space capsule in order to test survival of the rock and the microfossils during entry into the Earth’s atmosphere (the STONE 6 experiment). The silicified volcanic sediment ...