Oldest fossils of methane-cycling microbes expand frontiers of habitability on early Earth

A team of international researchers, led by the University of Bologna, has discovered the fossilised remains of methane-cycling microbes that lived in a hydrothermal system beneath the seafloor 3.42 billion years ago.
The locality of the study area in the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa[Credit: A. Hofmann]
The microfossils are the oldest evidence for this type of life and expand the frontiers of potentially habitable environments on the early Earth, as well as other planets such as Ma