Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rocked By Wrinkles In The Atlas Mountains Of Morocco

Mats of chemosynthetic bacteria forming below the layer of turbidity.

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Signs of Ancient Life Turn Up in an Unexpected Place | GSA News Release 26-02

Geologists led by Dr Rowan Martindale of the University of Texas at Austin, working with colleagues including Stéphane Bodin of Aarhus University, Denmark, have discovered strange crenulated structures in rocks in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco that reveal something unexpected about microscopic life 160 million years ago. Their findings are published today in the journal Geology. The evidence, plain to see in the rocks, should not exist if creationist mythology had any basis in fact.

The reality is that, during that vast span of Earth’s history before creationists imagine their god created the small flat world with a dome over it described in the Bible, something unusual was happening deep within marine sediments that later became the Atlas Mountains. Bacteria were forming microbial mats at least 160 metres below the sea floor, far beyond the reach of sunlight.

That alone is remarkable, but what makes the discovery particularly unusual is the distinctive ripple-like crenulations the mats produced. Structures like these are normally associated with microbial mats forming on the surface of undisturbed sediment. Such mats were common before the Cambrian Period, more than 540 million years ago, when complex mobile animals had not yet evolved to burrow through and mix the seafloor. In those earlier times, microbial mats could grow across the sediment surface and preserve delicate textures and ripples.

However, once burrowing animals proliferated during the Cambrian, the upper layers of marine sediment began to be constantly churned up in a process known as bioturbation. This destroyed microbial mats and prevented the formation of the characteristic surface patterns they once produced. For the last half-billion years these textures have therefore been extremely rare in normal marine sediments, appearing today only in limited environments such as very shallow waters where photosynthetic microbial mats can still establish themselves.

Yet the Moroccan rocks contain similar crenulated structures formed about 160 million years ago—hundreds of millions of years after burrowing animals had transformed the seafloor. The explanation is that these features formed not at the surface but deep within the sediment, where chemosynthetic microbes were able to grow undisturbed by burrowing organisms. Instead of relying on sunlight and organic debris, these microbes obtained energy from chemical reactions involving minerals in the sediment itself.

Far from supporting creationist assertions that life cannot arise from inorganic sources, chemosynthetic microbes have been exploiting chemical energy from rocks and minerals for billions of years.

Microbial Mats, Bioturbation, and Chemosynthesis.
Microbial mats – Earth’s earliest ecosystems
Long before animals evolved, much of the seafloor was covered by dense carpets of microorganisms known as microbial mats. These layered communities of bacteria and archaea formed sticky films on the sediment surface. The microbes trapped fine particles and secreted binding substances that stabilised the sediment, producing distinctive textures such as wrinkles, ripples, and polygonal patterns that could later be preserved in rock.

For billions of years these mats dominated shallow marine environments and played a major role in Earth’s early ecosystems. Fossilised examples are known from some of the oldest sedimentary rocks on Earth and are among the earliest direct traces of life.

The Cambrian revolution and the end of undisturbed seafloors
This situation changed dramatically about 540 million years ago, during the Cambrian Period, when animals capable of burrowing through sediment became widespread. Worm-like organisms, arthropods, and other early animals began digging through the seabed in search of food or shelter.

This activity—known as bioturbation—constantly churns and mixes the upper layers of sediment. Once this behaviour became common, microbial mats could rarely remain intact on the sediment surface because the sediment was continually disturbed and mixed. As a result, the distinctive ripple- and wrinkle-like textures formed by microbial mats largely disappeared from the geological record after the Cambrian.

Today such structures survive only in unusual environments where animals cannot easily disturb the sediment—for example hypersaline lagoons, tidal flats, or very shallow waters dominated by photosynthetic microbes.

Life without sunlight: chemosynthesis
The Moroccan discovery is unusual because similar mat-like structures appear in rocks that formed hundreds of millions of years after burrowing animals had transformed the seafloor.

The key lies in a different kind of microbial metabolism. Instead of relying on sunlight, chemosynthetic microbes obtain energy from chemical reactions involving minerals or dissolved compounds such as sulphur, methane, or iron. These organisms can thrive in environments where sunlight never reaches, including deep-sea hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, and buried marine sediments.

Because the Moroccan microbial communities lived deep within the sediment—well below the zone disturbed by burrowing animals—they were able to form mats and preserve crenulated textures even in a post-Cambrian world where surface mats are normally destroyed.

Why the discovery matters
The Moroccan rocks reveal that microbial ecosystems could still build structured communities long after the Cambrian “bioturbation revolution,” provided they lived deep enough in the sediment to escape disturbance by animals. The discovery therefore sheds light on hidden microbial ecosystems in ancient oceans and demonstrates that the geological record still preserves traces of microbial life in unexpected places.

How this discovery was made, and what it reveals about life in the oceans 160 million years ago, is explained in a news release from the Geological Society of America.

Signs of Ancient Life Turn Up in an Unexpected Place
Deep-water sediment layers reveal rare microbial wrinkle structures formed far from sunlight
Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was walking through the Dadès Valley in the Central High Atlas Mountains of Morocco when she saw something that literally stopped her in her tracks.

Martindale and her colleagues, including Stéphane Bodin of Aarhus University, were trekking through the rocky valley to study the ecology of the ancient reef systems that once sat below sea level there. To get to the reefs, they first had to traverse through layers and layers of turbidites—deposits made by thick submarine debris flows. Ripple marks are common on turbidites, but Martindale had spotted crenulations superimposed on the ripples that seemed out of place.

As we're walking up these turbidites, I'm looking around and this beautifully rippled bedding plane caught my eye. I said, ‘Stéphane, you need to get back here. These are wrinkle structures!’

Dr. Rowan C. Martindale, lead author.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas, USA.

Wrinkle structures are millimeter- to centimeter-scale ridges and pits that can form on sandy beds when algal and microbial communities form mats or aggregates. Wrinkles are usually obliterated by animal activity, and so they’re rare in rocks younger than 540 million years ago, when there was an explosion of animal evolution. Today, wrinkle structures are commonly found in shallow tidal areas where photosynthetic algae thrive.

But the turbidites Martindale was walking across were deposited too deep in the water for light to reach, at least 180 meters below the surface, meaning the wrinkles couldn’t have been made by the same type of algae that form them today. In fact, the few previous studies proposing wrinkle structures in ancient turbidite deposits were contested. Additionally, the rocks were only about 180 million years old, when animals were tearing up the delicate seafloor all over the world. By all accounts, the wrinkle structures shouldn’t have been there. Martindale realized she needed to get to work to make sure she could trust her instinct.

Let's go through every single piece of evidence that we can find to be sure that these are wrinkle structures in turbidites, [because wrinkle structures, usually photosynthetic in origin,] shouldn't be in this deep-water setting.

Dr. Rowan C. Martindale.

When the team closely examined the geologic evidence and determined that the sediment layers were indeed turbidites, the next step was to make sure the textures they observed were definitely biotic wrinkles. Analysis revealed the layers just below the wrinkles contained elevated levels of carbon—a signature of biotic origin. Furthermore, videos from remotely operated submersibles taken of the seafloor well below the photic zone showed that microbial mats could form from chemosynthetic bacteria—bacteria that get energy from chemical reactions rather than light.

Combining the evidence from the geologic setting, chemistry, and modern analogs satisfied the team that they had documented chemosynthetic wrinkle structures in the rock record. They determined that the turbidites bring nutrients and organic matter with them, reducing oxygen levels and creating conditions ripe for chemosynthetic life. Then, in the calm periods between turbidite deposition, those bacteria form mats atop the sediment that subsequently wrinkle into the distinctive texture Martindale observed in Morocco. Usually, the next turbidite erodes away the mat, but every once in a while, the mats and their wrinkles are preserved.

Going forward, Martindale hopes to conduct laboratory experiments to explore how these structures might form within turbidites. She also hopes that these findings spur other researchers to incorporate chemosynthetic mats in a paradigm that previously included only a photosynthetic mat origin for wrinkle structures. Then geologists could look for wrinkle structures in new places that were previously written off as fruitless settings in the search for early life on Earth.

Wrinkle structures are really important pieces of evidence in the early evolution of life. [By ignoring their possible presence in turbidites,] we might be missing out on a key piece of history of microbial life.

Dr. Rowan C. Martindale.

Publication:
Rowan C. Martindale, Sinjini Sinha, Travis N. Stone, Tanner Fonville, Stéphane Bodin, François-Nicolas Krencker, Peter Girguis, Crispin T.S. Little, Lahcen Kabiri;
Chemosynthetic microbial communities formed wrinkle structures in ancient turbidites. Geology 2025;; 54 (2): 173–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/G53617.1

Abstract
Wrinkle structures are often interpreted to be formed by photosynthetic microbial mats. They are rare in Phanerozoic marine subtidal environments because animal activity typically destroys mats or biofilms before lithification. We report wrinkle structures in lower Toarcian (Lower Jurassic) turbidites from the Tagoudite Formation in Morocco. These wrinkles are consistent with those from shallower deposits; however, given their paleodepth (~200 m), it is unlikely they were formed by photoautotrophic communities. Modern turbidites are known to host chemosynthetic communities, often with extensive microbial mat formation. We propose the Tagoudite Formation wrinkles were formed by chemosynthetic communities, and the sedimentological, geochemical, and hydrographical conditions of the turbidites excluded grazers, allowing wrinkle structure lithification. Wrinkle structures occur in Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, and Jurassic turbidites, and we posit that chemosynthetic mats growing on turbidity deposits represent a previously dismissed, underappreciated, or unrecognized mode of preservation. The chemosynthetic mat–induced wrinkle paradigm has significant implications; this taphonomic window for wrinkle preservation in turbidites expands the range of environments where these microbially induced sedimentary structures form and the communities that made them. Wrinkles in turbidites also represent new possibilities for the study of chemosynthetic ecosystems in deep time.

Figure 1.

Lithological log of the Tagoudite Formation in the Central High Atlas Mountains, Morocco. Inset map shows the Toarcian paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the western Tethys Ocean (modified from Bodin et al., 2016, and references therein) and the location of the study area. Photograph of the wrinkle structure outcrop shows the top of the rippled bed at ~74 m. The section continues below (Ouchbis Formation) and above (Tagoudite and Tafraout Formations) the log.

Figure 2.

Photographs of wrinkle structures in the Tagoudite Formation of the Central High Atlas Mountains, Morocco. Black arrows point to wrinkles on ripple crests; white arrows point to wrinkles in ripple troughs. (A) Straight rippled bedding plane with wrinkles. (B) Complex ripples with wrinkles (scale bar squares are 5 × 5 mm). (C) Close-up of wrinkles in ripple troughs and crests from panel B. (D) Wrinkles in ripple troughs. Note the lack of wrinkles on the crest. (E) Well-developed wrinkles in the trough and crest of ripples. (F–H) Variations in size, shape, and texture of wrinkles as they interact with ripples on the bedding plane at ~74 m in the stratigraphic log. (I) Cross section of rippled unit (pen diameter is 9 mm at widest point). (J) Polished cross section through wrinkle structure sample (NPL00090497). Samples are reposited at the University of Texas at Austin (USA).

Figure 3.

Cross sections of wrinkle structures from the Tagoudite Formation of the Central High Atlas Mountains, Morocco. Thin sections are perpendicular to the bedding plane (wrinkles at top). (A) Photomicrograph (plane polarized light [PPL]) of thin section NPL00090500.001. (B) Backscattered electron–scanning electron microscopy (BSE-SEM) image of dashed box in panel A. Images below panels A and B are energy dispersive X-Ray spectroscopy (EDS) maps of the BSE-SEM image in panel B (same scale). (C) Photomicrograph (PPL) of thin section NPL00090498.001. (D) BSE-SEM image of dashed box in panel C. Images below panels C and D are EDS maps of the BSE-SEM image in panel D (same scale). Elements are noted in the bottom right corner of the EDS maps; epoxy (top of the thin section) is black in most maps but red in the carbon map.

Rowan C. Martindale, Sinjini Sinha, Travis N. Stone, Tanner Fonville, Stéphane Bodin, François-Nicolas Krencker, Peter Girguis, Crispin T.S. Little, Lahcen Kabiri;
Chemosynthetic microbial communities formed wrinkle structures in ancient turbidites. Geology 2025;; 54 (2): 173–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/G53617.1

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by Geological Society of America. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

These Moroccan rocks provide yet another reminder that life has repeatedly found ways to exploit environments that might once have seemed inhospitable. Long after burrowing animals had transformed the seafloor and apparently eliminated the conditions needed for microbial mats to leave their characteristic signatures, microbial communities were quietly thriving deep within the sediment, drawing energy directly from chemical reactions in the surrounding minerals. Their activity left traces that survived for 160 million years, waiting to be discovered in the rocks of the Atlas Mountains.

Far from fitting the simplistic narratives favoured by creationists, discoveries like this reveal a biosphere that is far older, more adaptable, and far more inventive than ancient mythology allows. Life does not require perfect conditions or supernatural intervention; it exploits whatever energy sources are available, whether sunlight at the surface or chemical gradients deep beneath the seabed.

Once again, the rocks tell a consistent story stretching back hundreds of millions of years—one of evolving ecosystems, microbial innovation, and a dynamic planet. And once again, the evidence fits comfortably within the framework of evolutionary biology and Earth history, while leaving creationist claims with yet another inconvenient fact to explain away.

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