Researchers have identified rocks that they say could contain the fossilised remains of life on early Mars.
The team made their discovery in the ancient rocks of Nili Fossae.
Their work has revealed that this trench on Mars is a "dead ringer" for a region in Australia where some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth has been buried and preserved in mineral form.
They report the findings in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
The team, led by a scientist from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (Seti) in California, believes that the same "hydrothermal" processes that preserved these markers of life on Earth could have taken place on Mars at Nili Fossae.
The rocks there are up to four billion years old, which means they have been around for three-quarters of the history of Mars.
When, in 2008, scientists first discovered carbonate in those rocks the Mars science community reacted with great excitement; carbonate had long been sought as definitive evidence that the Red planet was habitable - that life could have existed there.
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“Start Quote
This is the place that we should be checking out for life on early Mars”
End Quote Adrian Brown Seti Institute
Carbonate is what life - or at least the mineral portion of a living organism - turns into, in many cases, when it is buried. The white cliffs of Dover, for example, are white because they contain limestone, or calcium carbonate.
The mineral comes from the fossilised remains shells and bones and provides a way to investigate the ancient life that existed on early Earth. ...
via BBC News - Mars site may hold 'buried life'.
Mars has been abandoned for a long time... at least that's how it seems on the surface. Richard Hoagland has some of the most entertainingly different ideas about Mars.
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