TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Research done by The National Magnetic Field Laboratory has discovered the oldest known color: bright pink.
Researchers were able to crush 1.1 billion-year-old rocks found in beneath the Sahara desert in Africa into powder before analyzing molecules of ancient organisms from them.
Those organism gave off a bright pink pigment.
Mag-Lab Chemist Amy McKenna explains the importance of this discovery.
"Because we could look at the compounds that are the fossils of the organisms that lived in the ocean at that time," said McKenna. "We can tell a lot about the Earth's ocean at a billion years ago, which is huge because it tells us why animal and plant life had not evolved at that time."
A scientist at the Australian National University was the lead author on the study.
