For my art project, I painted using acrylic paint on mixed media paper of a landscape that represents early earth when microbes were the only living organisms that thrived in the toxic atmosphere. Today there are ancient and modern stromatolites, in my painting it represents the older known stromatolites. These “rock layers” are formed by certain kinds of microbial mats that have carbonate and silicate minerals to help promote fossilization. This is the reason why there are still some ancient stromatolites around but they were more common and diverse about 2.8 to 1 billion years ago. Bacteria like, Cyanobacteria that are aerobic photoautotrophs and green non-sulfur Chloroflexus that are photoheterotroph played a very big role in the formation of these microbial mats. Overall, without microbes we would not be here today, especially the ones that helped oxygenate our atmosphere.
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