The world’s oldest color has been discovered by the scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) and from the overseas. According to the new study, the bright shade of pink is the oldest color present on the Earth. The pink color segments were extracted from the rocks underneath the African Sahara desert and the color is said to be 1.1 billion years old.
According to Dr. Nur Gueneli, the color pigment was half a billion years old that was extracted from the marine black shales of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa. She discovered the color pigment for her Ph.D. studies. She said that the bright pink shades are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were originated by ancient photosynthetic organisms that inhabited an ancient ocean that has vanished with time.
The range of fossils vary from blood red to deep purple color in their concentrated forms and are bright pink in color when they are diluted. The research undertaken by ANU was provided support from Geosciences Australia and from the experts and researchers from Japan and the US. Dr. Gueneli addressed that the precise analysis of the ancient pigments made sure that the tiny cyanobacteria ruled the base in the food chain found in the oceans millions of years ago, which has explained why the animals were not found at that time.
Jochen Brocks, the senior lead researcher and associate professor from ANU said that the appearance of the large animals and organisms was likely to become restricted by the limited supply of larger food particles for example algae. The research has been published in the journal named PNAS.
Dr. Brocks also added that the extinction of cyanobacterial oceans happened about 650 million years ago when the rapid spread of algae began to burst the amount of energy that was required for the evolution of the complex ecosystems where the existence of humans and other animals could be made possible on earth.