Salty, Old and, Perhaps, a Sign of Early Life

In this article, it talks abouit how scientists found out that where the desert is now in New Mexico there was a big ocean, that dried but that left salt that has molecules of cellulose in it, that is what makes up plant-cell walls, so with this they can look at stuff and things that existed even before dinosaurs.
So Because the molecule is made by living organisms, its presence in the salt deposit is evidence that some kind of ancient organism made the cellulose trapped inside.
To find out the molecules, scientists took materials from the salt to put them in a solution that would kill everything exept for cellulose. So The research team used radioactive dating to determine that the salt crystals—and the cellulose inside of them—formed more than 250 million years ago. In all that time, the crystals have hardly changed.
The findings tell the research team that ancient salt deposits like these might be ideal for preserving ancient molecules, which are signs of early life.
The evidence says that the organisms that live before and that the molecules that their bodies had, broke down really easily because of sunlight, or other living things that diggested them.
So there is a special name for scientists that study this kind of things, like the molecules, and the science they study is call astrobiology, that means the study of life in the universe, so they are trying to look for things like life in other planets, and in other universe, and to answer questions about life in space, like does something exists now, or does something existed in the past? and that kind of stuff.
Because they are interesting things that make this posible like Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa once had oceans, so maybe they had the salt depossits too, so maybe there was life in those planets too, but theres nothing that we can know for sure...

What I think about this research, is that there are a lot of things that can be connected between out planet Earth and some other planets in the Universe, just like Mars, so I think that if more research like this is done, maybe a lot of more proofs can be find to know if there has been life in some other planets and to compare them one to another, to see how different one planet can be from another one.
But I also find this really interesting becuase I didn't have any idea that the molecules in the salt could tell you more about life a long time ago, of the organisms that lived before we did, so I find this really interesting, to find new ways of discovering life in the past, to really now more about how was it before we (humans) started living in Earth, and how was life before, and to know the reasons because it changed and how and why did things happened.

by: Marcela Murillo Trujano