A one-billion-year-old multicellular chlorophyte

Chlorophytes (which represent a clade within the Viridiplantae and a sister group of the Streptophyta) probably dominated marine export bioproductivity and played a key role in facilitating ecosystem complexity before the Mesozoic diversification of phototrophic eukaryotes such as diatoms, coccolithophorans, and dinoflagellates. Molecular clock and biomarker data indicate that chlorophytes diverged in the Mesoproterozoic or early Neoproterozoic, followed by their subsequent phylogenetic diversification, multicellular evolution, and ecological expansion in the late Neoproterozoic and Paleozoic. This model, however, has not been rigorously tested with paleontological data because of the scarcity of Proterozoic chlorophyte fossils. Here we report abundant millimeter-sized, multicellular, and morphologically differentiated macrofossils from ~1,000 Ma rocks. These fossils are described as Proterocladus antiquus new species and are interpreted as benthic siphonocladalean chlorophytes, suggesting that chlorophytes acquired macroscopic size, multicellularity, and cellular differentiation nearly a billion years ago, much earlier than previously thought.