Scientist Russell Vreeland Discusses Discover of the Oldest Living Life Form on Earth
ANDRIA HALL, CNN ANCHOR: Sometimes you never know what you're going to find under a rock, and this next story is about just that. This time, scientists say they have found the oldest living life form on Earth. We're joined now by Russell Vreeland, whose team discovered this ancient bacteria. Mr. Vreeland, thank you for joining us on</s>MORNING NEWS. RUSSELL VREELAND, SCIENTIST: Good morning. You're welcome.</s>HALL: The previous holder of that record was a mere 25-40 million years old. This find now is 10 times that. It's amazing.</s>VREELAND: That is correct. Here is the rock. It's 250 million years old, and we managed to drill into it and get the organism right out about in there.</s>HALL: Should you be holding that thing? It looks like it should be somehow hermetically sealed?</s>VREELAND: Well, actually, we have been showing it to a wide variety of people, and the, my colleagues and I have decided that this is available for people to look at. So we brought it out. Otherwise, we protect it pretty much.</s>HALL: So we have got some show and tell here. Why is this discovery so important?</s>VREELAND: Well, the, from the scientific side of it, we often look at evolution in organisms, and we look at what we have today, and we try to understand what we were like years and years ago. Here we have an organism that is 250 million years old. So we can look at it there and say: How does it look now? and how did it change to get to here?</s>HALL: How do you actually determine how old an organism is? how do you find out? I mean, with the trees we know that you count the rings. But with an organism like this, how do you tell how old it is?</s>VREELAND: Well, actually, geologically, it's very much the same. They start off count the sedimentary layers on down to the age of the formation. In this case, the formation was dated both, with sedimentary layers, and also with radiometric types of dating, and also for fossils.</s>HALL: What about your skeptics who challenge the purity of your experiment and, therefore, question, perhaps, the age of this organism and its significance?</s>VREELAND: OK. Well, there are a lot of people who are going to be arguing about that. That's the scientific method and it should happen. That's one reason why we have made the rock available for people to look at. So they can decide for themselves whether or not the rock is as clean as we say it is. We've been showing people a whole variety of our procedures. And we have actually had the procedures reviewed by a completely separate group of scientists, "Nature" reviewed the article for over a year before agreeing to publish it. And since our work is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation Division of Earth Sciences, we have been reviewed by several panels and other groups of people, other scientists that are involved in this kind of work.</s>HALL: I bet you have great reverence for something when you are holding it, and it's 250 million years old. Thank you very much Russell Vreeland, for joining us.</s>VREELAND: You are welcome.