Research Project
Stromatolites and Acritarchs, Their Value in Telling Time in the Archaean and Proterozoic and in Understanding Global Environment and Atmosphere
Kath Grey has more than thirty years experience in studying fossils, pseudofossils, and dubiofossils, mainly from rocks older than about 500 million years. Much of her daily work involves interpreting the morphology and genesis of putative fossils, mainly of bacterial and algal origins. She has collected more than a thousand samples of stromatolites representative of most of the geological record, and is currently preparing a paper on stromatolite methodology and description with a group of international co-authors. She has examined and interpreted a wide-range of (sometimes controversial) structures using field studies, comparative morphology, and high- resolution microscopy. She published an analysis of the contentious ‘string of beads’ fossils, which included an appraisal of their possible biogenic origins – these fossils from 1 billion year old rocks in Western Australia.. In 1997, she was involved in the discovery of some of the most convincing evidence found so far of stromatolites in 3.45 billion-year-old rocks, again in Western Australia. These structures are proving to be a useful analogue for the search for fossil life on Mars, and are currently being studied by several international teams. Grey also studies the microscopic protozoans, the acritarchs, abundant remains in Precambrian rocks. These are most useful in sequencing rocks of this age and in recording major events during that time, such as the Acaman meteorite event in South Australia that radically selected for survivor species in this group.
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