What are acritarchs?

Acritarchs are mysterious microfosily found in large quantities in a layer of 2.1 billion to 400 million years. For information, complex multicellular organisms appeared about 600 million years ago, but in fact they did not take up to the "Cambrian Explosion" 540 million years ago. In essence, any small, non-slicing piece of organic material from the Proterozoic (2500-542 million years ago) is categorized as an acreitarch. Most acritarchs are interpreted as fossilized remnants of resting cysts of green algae or other eukaryotes (complex cellulum), created when the organism is somehow under pressure and must go into hibernation for a while. In the case of these fossils, it turned out that "for a while" was forever. Some accritants may also be early embryos. 635 million years old), where it is assumed that the only life on Earth was unicellular. Acritarchs are by their definition everything they have left. AcRitars are mostly the remains that have left eukaryotic organisms rather than BakteRie, which is about ten times smaller.

The first known Acritarch, Grpania , appears in a fossil record about 2.1 billion years ago. These small tube fossils are among the oldest known, some of which reach a centimeter, colossal for a period when the average organism was about 10,000 - 1,000,000 times smaller. There is uncertainty about whether grypania was a large bacterium, bacterial colony or early alga (eukaryote), but its size and consistent form caused most paleontologists to mark algae.

In addition to Grpania , most of the earliest accitarchs are simple and spherical. Strong microscopes have hauled little to reveal their secrets, because most of the Nano-Mock organization has been lost for hundreds of millions of years. From 2 to 1 billion years increases the diversity of acritarchs and examples are found with different surface ornaments like you arefor the vesicles in the shape of a flask, spikes (which would repel predators), triangular, funnels and hair such as protrusions, and other features. These acritarchs provide some of the earliest evidence of the existence of predation and diversifying an early eukaryotic life.