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Scientists have reported orderly, tube-like structures in marble and limestone from desert regions, but they have not identified a new species or confirmed that a living organism made them. The proposed biological origin remains an explanation under investigation, not a settled discovery.
What are the strange tubes in the desert rocks?
A report by The Daily Galaxy describes small, orderly burrows running through marble and limestone in Namibia, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. According to that account, erosion exposed the structures in the rock. It credits geologist Professor Cees Passchier of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz with first noticing them.
The report says the material inside the tubes contained traces interpreted as biological. It also says researchers had no known geological process that explained the structures. Those observations make a biological origin a possibility, but the structures themselves are not an organism, and the available account does not establish what made them.
Did scientists find a new microbe?
No specific microbe or species has been identified in the accessible reporting. The Daily Galaxy reports that the team considered cyanobacteria and fungi, but found reasons those candidates did not fit. That narrows the explanations discussed in the article; it does not prove that an undiscovered organism was responsible.
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| Possible explanation | What the report says | What that does—and does not—show |
|---|---|---|
| Cyanobacteria | The article says the structures occur in dark, deep layers, which was presented as a problem for an explanation involving sunlight-dependent cyanobacteria. | This reported mismatch makes that candidate less convincing in the account; it does not identify another maker. |
| Fungi | The article says expected chemical traces were absent and the structures’ symmetry, spacing, and width differed from what researchers expected. | These reported differences weigh against the proposed fungal explanation, but they are not proof of a different organism. |
| Another biological source | The article presents biological traces inside the tubes and a lack of a known geological explanation as reasons to consider a biological origin. | This remains a hypothesis. The organism, if there was one, is unnamed. |
Passchier is quoted in The Daily Galaxy as saying, “We were surprised because these tubes are clearly not the result of a geological process.” The article also attributes to him the statement “as no known chemical or physical weathering mechanism can explain this phenomenon,” presented there as a fragment within a sentence. These quotations are reported secondhand in that article; they have not been independently checked against an interview or the paper.
Are the rock burrows still alive?
The accessible account does not establish whether any organism remains alive. It raises the possibility that the structures formed during wetter conditions in the past, but does not provide a confirmed age or evidence that the maker is still present. Calling this a discovery of living microbes would go beyond what the report establishes.
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What is known about the study?
The Daily Galaxy links to a 2025 paper in Geomicrobiology Journal, identified by DOI 10.1080/01490451.2025.2467417. The publisher page was not accessible for verification here, so the paper’s methods, sample counts, dates, and precise conclusions cannot be confirmed from the available account. SSBCrack News repeats the story, but repetition is not independent confirmation.
The careful takeaway is that unusual micro-burrows have been reported in desert rock and a biological origin has been proposed. Their maker, age, and any present-day survival remain unresolved.
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