It’s almost impossible to imagine what the world looked like 1.1 billion years ago. We can conjure dramatic scenes of dinosaurs lording over the earth, strange landscapes, and volatile volcanoes, but we rarely consider the pigments that defined that world; and as it turns out, there was a whole lot of pink.
A team of researchers from the Australian National University have discovered the oldest known colors produced by living things, by grinding up pieces of marine shale. Belonging to cyanobacteria and used in photosynthesis, the pigments were found in shale of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, and resemble the color of sunrise.
