A team of Australian researchers have uncovered the world’s oldest fossils in a remote corner of frigid Greenland, giving us a glimpse of Earth’s earliest lifeforms -- lifeforms that could have also existed on Mars.

“It’s an amazing discovery,” University of New South Wales professor Martin Van Kranendok told CTV News Channel. “It’s needle-in-a-haystack kind of stuff.”

Discovered near Greenland’s southwestern coast, the 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolite fossils were exposed by the recent melting of a perennial snow patch.

“People have been walking through that area for many, many years,” Van Kranendok, who co-authored the team’s study, said.

“But it just so happened that one spring, there was a lot of rain that melted some snow and exposed some new rocks that were really well-preserved.”

Dated using uranium-lead geochronology, the fossils are 220 million years older than similar fossils discovered in Western Australia, which were previously thought to be the world’s oldest.

Stromatolite fossils are layered mounds of carbonate constructed by communities of microbes. The Greenland stromatolites, which measure one to four centimetres in height, were laid down in a shallow sea, giving scientists a glimpse of the environment in which earth’s earliest single cell life formed and thrived.

“It tells us a little bit more information about how rapidly life evolved on our planet and when and where that happened,” Van Kranendok said.

Up until roughly 3.9 billion years ago, Van Kranendok says that meteorites violently bombarded Earth, vaporizing our oceans and sterilizing the planet.

“Previously we thought that… it might have taken a billion years for life to evolve,” Van Kranendok said. “And then this discovery of life is only 3.7 billion years, so it actually only gives us a 200 million year window for life to evolve.”

What’s even more significant, Van Kranendok adds, is that this discovery shows that 3.7 billion years ago, life was already incredibly diverse.

“Whole communities we found covering the sea floor,” he said. “This find shows us that life was already quite well-established by that time.”

Researchers say that the ground-breaking find could also point to similar life structures on Mars, which hosted a damp environment 3.7 billion years ago.

The team’s findings were published today in Nature. You can read their study online.