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Cradle of Life: the Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils
Helder, M. 1999.  CM 4(6):3-5. CELD ID 4012

Abstract
Within geology there are few fields of study more esoteric than the search for fossils in early Precambrian rock. Indeed as Dr. J. William Schopf shows in his 1999 book Cradle of Life, the number of major players in the field since 1960 have been few indeed. This is scarcely surprising, however, when we realize that suitable fossil beds are known only from northwestern Australia and South Africa near the border with Swaziland. Such microbial fossils were unknown until 1953 when economic geologist Stanley A. Tyler noticed strange circular formations in rocks on the shore of Lake Superior near the hamlet of Schreiber, Ontario. He and paleobotanist Dr. Elso S. Barghoorn published a brief report in Science in 1954, but after that no new information appeared until 1964.