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  4. What's the oldest mummified lifeform
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What's the oldest mummified lifeform

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Offline Iwonda (OP)

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What's the oldest mummified lifeform
« on: 04/08/2020 23:14:18 »
What is the oldest mummified lifeform that has been found and are they only found in amber?
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Offline evan_au

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Re: What's the oldest mummified lifeform
« Reply #1 on: 05/08/2020 12:03:50 »
I agree that there are spectacular fossils embedded in amber. With the introduction of CAT scanning, even more are being revealed in samples of opaque amber.

Limestone is a mummified creature - the original coral has been preserved (but the normally-invisible organic polyps are lost).

The oldest, at 1 billion years are probably stromatolites, where you can see the layers of silt built up by cyanobacteria into a dome. The normally-invisible organic algae are no longer present.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite#Fossil_record

But if you are looking for something that retains the organic content, coal is a mummified lifeform: the original carbon is retained, as are remains of some of the chemicals that made up the original plants. A lot of coal deposits date from the Carboniferous era, around 300 million years ago (before land animals came along to eat the plants).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

You may need to define "mummified" more closely.
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Offline Iwonda (OP)

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Re: What's the oldest mummified lifeform
« Reply #2 on: 06/08/2020 05:15:03 »
I think your reply very much covered what I was looking for. I find the part about coal very interesting.
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