Talk:Stromatolite

message: Information please!
Quoting from the article:  "The Precambrian atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide, but lacking in oxygen necessary to sustain more complex multicelluar life."
What does this mean?  I checked the Precambrian page and found no information.  I'm curious why oxygen is considered necessary for complex multicelluar life. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.96.153.252 (talk) 05:18, 21 March 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untitled 

message: The reason oxygen is essential for complex multi-cellular life is the fact that oxygen is essential for resperation which in turn sustains life and therefore without substantial oxygen, life could not exist. (complex multi-cellular organisms are all forms with more than one cell). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.59.8.232 (talk) 05:52, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Answer 

message: The opening sentence of this article reads:
Stromatolites (from Greek strōma, mattress, bed, stratum, and lithos, rock) are defined as "attached, lithified sedimentary growth structures, accretionary away from a point or limited surface of initiation".
I'm not comfortable with the "are defined as" in this. Who defines them this way? I'm a bit concerned that the author doesn't entirely understand the definition and is just copying from an unidentified reference work. I certainly don't understand it, but I'm not a biologist.
I also wonder if there isn't a more vernacular definition that might be of use to the general reader. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.29.196.90 (talk) 18:07, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I came to this page to make the same argument; the first sentence should be a summary of what stromatolites are, not a quote of a particular source (and a distracting etymmology embedded). Will come back to this... battery... dying... :) --babbage (talk) 00:26, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lead sentence needs attribution 

message: According to reference #8, stromatolites reached "peak diversity 1 to 1.3 billion years ago... then declined to about 75% of this level between 1 billion and 700 million years ago, dropping to less than 20% at the beginning of the Cambrian", i.e. 550 million years ago.  A decline in diversity is characteristic of competition, e.g. emergence of stationary multi-cellular Eurkarya sea-weeds, c.1000 Mya.  A drop in diversity is characteristic of predation, e.g. emergence of mobile multi-cellular Bilateran macro-predators, c.600 Mya.
24.143.65.75 (talk) 00:27, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Competition' ''vs.'' 'Predation' ? 

message: I'm gonna be really honest, this article sucks. It sounds like it was written by someone who knew no more about stromatalites than what he had learned in the last five minutes from Google. Someone should fix this. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 63.245.145.101 (talk) 23:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fix it 

message: May this article can stay better in sedimentary rocks. Not all stromatolites are sure from organic source, also the article states the modern stromatolites are far different from the precambian ones. --Demostene119 20:36, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fossil? 

message: I think more should be written about the importence of stromatolites in the evoloution of life Thoughts?--Mdavies 965 (talk) 10:15, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: See Microbial mat, of which stromatolites are a special case. I'll add a "further info" tag at the top for now. -- Philcha (talk) 21:49, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Importance 

message: There is a widely held misconception that plants photosynthesize in order make food. While this is true, plants also use CO2 to make their own structure. Most of the public does not realize that, for example, a redwood tree is largely made of carbon from C02 manufactured during photosynthesis. In the section on the fossil record, the statement is made that cyanobacteria photosynthesize to make their food. 
While this may seem petty, I think it is something we need to be careful about.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vdeneroff (talk • contribs) 21:32, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Depends on how you define "food". Strictly speaking plants and cyanobacteria photosynthesize water and CO2 to produce energy (sugar, later converted to  ATP), some of which they use to build structural components, which in plants are largely made of more water and CO2. -- Philcha (talk) 22:02, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't we use the food we eat to grow our muscles and bones as well? [edit:] and striclty speaking, they don't photosynthesyze to produce enrgy, but to change the sun's energy into chemical energy stored in sugar ;-)Simon.gall (talk) 19:38, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misconception 

message: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Stromatolite
Khullah (talk) 01:17, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who copied who? 

message: Stromatolites form mounds allot like human settlement sites accumulate, over time, into  Tells.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.235.26.150 (talk) 14:31, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tells 

message: I've found some old references discussing the term "cryptozoon" (with reference to the Warrior Formation), and I think this old term is out of usage and is replaced with "stromatolite".  Can anyone confirm this with an external reference?  It would be good to clarify this in this article. Jstuby (talk) 20:42, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cryptozoon 

message: Ernst Louis Kalkowsky defined the term 'stromatolite' and published the first papers on stromatolites. Perhaps this article should mention him. 216.41.199.116 (talk) 23:07, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ernst Kalkowsky 

message: The article mentions several locations, but omits an important one - in the gypsum lakes of Innes National Park at the tip of Yorke Peninsula, South Australia. According to the South Australian state Department of Environment and Natural Resources brochure on Innes National Park, this is one of only three locations in the world where they are found in that particular form.  I am not knowledgeable about these details, but i feel it rates a mention. Ptilinopus (talk) 07:08, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Places where found 

message: It's mentioned how fruitful it's been to view stromatolites forming and existing with time lapse photography, but there's not a video link (or a citation). Wikipedia can be such a tease sometimes! Does anybody know where I could see such a video? I had no luck searching elsewhere. It would be a great illustration, both for my sake and other readers. Thanks. Vincentvanguard (talk) 02:25, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Time lapse photography of modern stromatolite formation" 

message: This claim needs to be treated skeptically. See\this WaPo article, which quotes rxns from uninvolved scientists:
:The multiple lines of evidence for the Greenland stromatolites "are not as clear cut as you’d ideally want for such an extraordinary claim," cautioned Abigail Allwood, a geologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has studied fossil stromatolites.  
That said, the photos look pretty convincing, to this definitely NOT expert eye ;-]  --Pete Tillman (talk) 16:47, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  3.7 by stromatolites? "not as clear cut [evidence] as you’d ideally want for such an extraordinary claim" 

message: An argument which refutes the 2016 study, regarding the 3.7 billion years old Stromatolite. Nature National Geographic -- 58.231.151.59 (talk) 14:05, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well that certainly makes it clear we can't just give an age in Wikipedia's voice. The controversy might be worth a few sentences in the article but it would have to be rewritten carefully with the new evidence in mind, so for now I've just removed it. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:26, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:   I recommend to include both findings, that would be fair for the respective authors. 112.165.80.174 (talk) 00:36, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: 2018 review of a 2016 study

message: There are a dozen published articles dating back 30 years that state that eukaryotic organisms (like Euglena and Diatoms) secrete biofilm that traps particulates and form stromatolites. There is a cave in Indiana with sufficient evidence that prokaryotes are not the only organisms that create these structures. I'm not going to change the article, because honestly it's as misinformed as most of the Google search results.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.248.38.23 (talk) 16:21, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prokaryotes (cyanobacteria) are not the only organisms that create them 

message: Are stromatolites made of only layers and layers of cyanobacteria or do they have a rock or limestone core? Or are the rocks layered with the bacteria until this rock-bacteria mix forms the whole stromatolite? The article doesn't seem to say. 
It mentions biofilms, which can be both bacteria and another surface, like rock. But it also mentions microbial mats. Are stromatolites the whole structure or are they simply the bacteria that have affixed themselves to the rock? If the stromatolites are the whole structure then only the bacteria that forms the outer shell are exposed to the light. Right?  -RoyGoldsmith (talk) 16:34, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I figured it out. -RoyGoldsmith (talk) 23:11, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  What are Stromatolites made of? 

message: One of the references: 
:https://web.archive.org/web/20180319165624/http://www.indiana.edu/~geol105b/images/gaia_chapter_10/stromatolites.htm
had the exact same wording as was in the referance's first paragraph. I replaced the lead and made it a bit more understandable for us novices. -RoyGoldsmith (talk) 23:11, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism