Designation: - Tektite
Approximate Age: - 800,000 years
The origins of tektites are pretty explosive, since they’re formed when meteors hit the planet. These pieces of Darwin glass formed 800,000 years ago, when a meteor struck what’s now Tasmania. The Aboriginal Tasmanians clearly valued these glittery rocks, and so did Western scientists. As they pieced together the story of the meteor that made them, researchers found an extra secret inside the blobs of glass: Life.
See, the meteor hit a really swampy area on Tasmania, and all that steam and muck got mixed in with the molten glass. The steam made air bubbles in the rock, which trapped organic molecules that were protected from decay, hundreds of thousands of years later. It’s even been suggested that tektites like this could be capable of seeding life from one planet onto another.