But look at how similar they look. Let me show you the next picture which is even more impressive I think. Here's the picture of Paleolyngba. Again, this is from the ancient fossil record. Here's a modern Lyngbya, very, very similar. I don't think anyone in this room would question that these are likely to be very closely related. I mean, it could just be chance that they both converge on exactly the same morphology. But suspect that if someone handed me a living Paleolyngbya, if I could transport myself back several million years ago, that's what I would identify it as.
Let me tell you a little bit more about Lyngbya because we did quite a bit of work on this for awhile. We're still doing some work. Here it is again. It's a filamentous cyanobacterium. Here's an intertidal about half way down the Baja peninsula from the Pacific side. And you can see dark a dark shape here. These are almost exclusively Lyngbya mats. This is an enormous area of cyanobacteria. As I mentioned, they live in the intertidal and the nice thing about that is that they normally dry out every day. Now, the reason that's nice is we can't rush down to Baja every other week. But what we can do is dry up some of this mat, bring it home, put it on the roof at Ames, add water and presto-chango, we've got our little mat community. So, we've done a bit of work at Ames on that and quite a bit of work out in the field which is really where I prefer to do my work
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