Quote:
A 650-million-year-old reef, ten times higher than the Great Barrier Reef, has been discovered in the Australian Outback. Scientists believe that the reef, the only one of its age in the world, may hold evidence of the earliest examples of primitive animal life.
It was discovered in the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia by three scientists from Melbourne. It existed for five to ten million years in a tropical period between two Ice Ages. The next closest-aged series of reefs, about 800 million years old, is in Arctic Canada.
The scientists, from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, said that the reef could also explain the extent of climate change in the early history of Earth.
26th September 2008, 01:12 PM
