stromatolite
/strə(ʊ)ˈmatəlʌɪt
/noun
A calcareous mound built up of layers of lime-secreting cyanobacteria and trapped sediment, found in Precambrian rocks as the earliest known fossils, and still being formed in lagoons in Australasia.The formation has yielded numerous fossils of stromatolites in addition to microfossils....
- Fossilized cyanobacterial mounds are called stromatolites.
- At first sight, the Shark Bay stromatolites look like rocks lying in an orderly fashion in the intertidal zone.
Origin
1930s: from modern Latin stroma, stromat- 'layer, covering' + -lite.