NASA Curiosity Rover has released the impressions that are showing the traces of fossils on Mars. The Curiosity Lens Imager (MAHLI) has taken the photographs of Ordovician trace fossils.

“They look remarkably similar to Ordovician trace fossils I have studied and photographed here on Earth,” Barry DiGregorio, a research fellow at the University of Buckingham.

“If not trace fossils, what other geological explanations will NASA come up with?” he added.

The rover’s arm contains the MAHLI lens which is a focusable color camera. Before there are only black and white images captured in this camera. There are only small images captured at 1 millimeter or 2 in width and 5 millimeters in length.

Those images were so tiny to see. Vasavada said that the close-up looks at the features show them to be angular in lots of dimensions related to the crystals in rock and moulds.

“These were unique enough, given the fact that we didn’t know they were there… (that) we thought we should go back,” Vasavada said the Curiosity project scientist at NASA.

“We certainly won’t jump to that as our first interpretation”, he said.

“If we see more of them… then we begin to say that this is an important process that’s going on at Vera Rubin Ridge”, he added.

“A common example of bioturbation is the formation of worm burrows. The burrows, once refilled with sediments, fossilized and then exposed by erosion, can end up looking like wiggly sticks,” Mr Lee said.