An international team of researchers from Australia, Japan, the United States and Belgium has successfully extracted bright pink biological pigments from 1.1-billion-year-old marine sedimentary rocks of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa. Biogeochemist Dr. Janet Hope holds an ampoule with pink colored porphyrins. Image credit: Australian National University. “The bright pink pigments called porphyrins are the molecular fossils of chlorophylls...