Abstract A growing awareness of life in deep igneous crust expands our appreciation for life's distribution in the upper geosphere through time and space, and extends the known inhabitable realm of Earth and possibly beyond. For most of life's history, until plants colonized land in the Ordovician, the deep biosphere was the largest reservoir of living biomass. This suggests that deep crustal habitats played an important role in the evolution and development of the biosphere. Paradoxically, the paleo-perspective of deep life has been largely neglected in the exploration of the deep biosphere as well as in paleontology as a whole. Here, we review the collective understanding of the fossil record in igneous crust with the aim to highlight a rising research field with great potential for substantial findings and progress in the near future. We include new results that emphasize the importance of direct or indirect dating of fossils and introduction of new techniques into the field. Currently, an incoherent record of morphological fossils- and chemofossils stretching from present to ~2.4 Ga implies the presence of an abundant and rich, yet largely unexplored, fossil record. Further investigations of deep paleo-environments will almost certainly result in substantial insights into the distribution and development of biospheres throughout life's history, the early evolution of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and Earth's early biogeochemical cycles. We emphasize the fossil record of igneous rock to give it the same status as the fossil record in sedimentary rocks, and to implement fossil investigations as standard procedures in future international drilling campaigns.

中文翻译：

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火成岩化石记录

摘要 对深部火成岩地壳生命的日益增长的认识扩大了我们对地球上层生命在时空上分布的认识，并扩展了地球上已知的宜居领域，甚至可能更远。在生命历史的大部分时间里，直到植物在奥陶纪殖民土地之前，深层生物圈是最大的生物量储存库。这表明深部地壳栖息地在生物圈的演化和发展中发挥了重要作用。矛盾的是，在对深层生物圈以及整个古生物学的探索中，对深层生命的古视角在很大程度上被忽视了。在这里，我们回顾了对火成岩地壳化石记录的集体理解，目的是突出一个新兴的研究领域，在不久的将来有巨大的发现和进展潜力。我们包括强调直接或间接化石年代测定和新技术引入该领域重要性的新结果。目前，从现在到~2.4 Ga 的形态化石和化学化石的不连贯记录意味着存在丰富而丰富但大部分未开发的化石记录。对深层古环境的进一步调查几乎肯定会导致对整个生命历史中生物圈的分布和发展、原核生物和真核生物的早期进化以及地球早期生物地球化学循环的深入了解。我们强调火成岩的化石记录，赋予它与沉积岩化石记录相同的地位，并将化石调查作为未来国际钻探活动的标准程序。