UCLA scientists analyze 650-million-year-old fossils inside r... 1/31/2006

UCLA scientists analyze 650-million-year-old fossils inside r... 1/31/2006: Very impressive, need to find out how it works.

"It's astounding to see an organically preserved, microscopic fossil inside a rock and see these microscopic fossils in three dimensions,' said Schopf, who is also a geologist, microbiologist and organic geochemist. 'It's very difficult to get any insight about the biochemistry of organisms that lived nearly a billion years ago, and this (confocal microscopy and Raman spectroscopy) gives it to you. You see the cells in the confocal microscopy, and the Raman spectroscopy gives you the chemistry.
'We can look underneath the fossil, see it from the top, from the sides, and rotate it around; we couldn't do that with any other technique, but now we can, because of confocal laser scanning microscopy. In addition, even though the fossils are exceedingly tiny, the images are sharp and crisp. So, we can see how the fossils have degraded over millions of years, and learn what are real biological features and what has been changed over time.'"