Scientists discover world’s oldest colour — bright pink

Aarti Drugs Ltd.

Australian National University (ANU) have discovered, what they claim is the "world's oldest colour"— bright pink.

According to a report by The Guardian, Australian scientists stumbled upon what they claim is the world’s oldest colour while extracting pigment from 1.1 billion-year-old rocks buried deep beneath Africa’s Sahara Desert.

The scientists discovered the molecules which were bright pink in colour after crushing and analysing the billion-year-old rocks.

“The bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting an ancient ocean that has long since vanished,” said Nur Gueneli, a PhD student who found the colour said, in a press statement released by ANU.

The pigments, extracted from marine black shale, ranged from blood red to deep purple when concentrated and bright pink when diluted.

The bright pink pigments are more than 0.5-billion years older than the pigment discoveries earlier in Taoudeni Basin, spread across Mali and Mauritania, a major geological formation spanning across a big chunk of West Africa.

They teamed up with researchers from the US, Japan, Belgium and Geoscience Australia which was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday.