The Not So Dead Sea: Traces of Ancient Bacteria Found in the Lake’s Sediments

Now Camille Thomas, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Geneva, and his colleagues have unearthed molecular fossils in Dead Sea sediments that suggest bacteria lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago. It is the first time scientists have discovered a life-form other than archaea in this ecosystem—which hints that such life might exist (or have existed in the past) in similar places across the globe and elsewhere in the solar system, including Mars. Take Mars—in 2011 NASA’s Opportunity rover stumbled on gypsum, the same mineral that Thomas found in the Dead Sea sediments.

Source: www.scientificamerican.com