The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Microorganisms Three Billion Years Old from the Precambrian of South Africa
Abstract
A minute, bacterium-like, rod-shaped organism, Eobacterium isolatum , has been found organically and structurally preserved in black chert from the Fig Tree Series (3.1 × 10 9 years old) of South Africa. Filamentous organic structures of probable biological origin, and complex alkanes, which apparently contain small amounts of the isoprenoid hydrocarbons pristane and phytane, are also indigenous to this Early Precambrian sediment. These organic remnants comprise the oldest known evidence of biological organization in the geologic record.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
On the origin of mitosing cells
Sagan, L. (1967) · Journal of Theoretical Biology · doi:10.1016/0022-5193(67)90079-3 · Cited by 1,870
Microfossils of the early Archean apex chert: New evidence of the antiquity of life
Schopf, J. W. (1993) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.260.5108.640 · Cited by 1,363
Self-citationFeulner, G. (2012) · Reviews of Geophysics · doi:10.1029/2011rg000375 · Cited by 338
Beginnings of biospheric evolution and their biogeochemical consequences
Cloud, P. (1976) · Paleobiology · doi:10.1017/s009483730000498x · Cited by 333
Metadata
- Authors
- Barghoorn, E. S., & Schopf, J. W.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1966-05-06
- Volume
- 152
- Issue
- 3723
- Pages
- 758-763
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W1999640473
- Cited by
- 212
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 52.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Microorganisms Three Billion Years Old from the Precambrian of South Africa. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.152.3723.758
- The paper
- Barghoorn, E. S., & Schopf, J. W. (1966). Microorganisms Three Billion Years Old from the Precambrian of South Africa. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.152.3723.758
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.