cyanobacteria

“At some point in the first billion years of life, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, learned to tap into a freely available resource—the hydrogen that exists in spectacular abundance in water. They absorbed water molecules, supped on the hydrogen, and released the oxygen as waste, and in so doing invented photosynthesis. . . . [P]hotosynthesis . . . was invented not by plants but by bacteria.”

—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003.

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