Scientists claim this egg-shaped object is the final proof of life on Mars after finding it inside a meteorite from the Red Planet.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted they could only have been produced by living organisms.
He added that they could not have been caused by contamination when they fell to Earth.
Prof Wickramasinghe, 72 — famous for controversial ideas such as that the flu virus and even life itself was brought to our planet by comets — said: “It is impossible to understand how carbon-rich particles of such uniform sizes and shapes got inside a rocky matrix if they are not relics of some algal species.
“Tissint was collected weeks after it fell, and terrestrial contamination seems unlikely. In any case the structures we found were on newly fractured surfaces, from the interior of the meteorite.”
The meteorite was named after the village where it came down in the Sahara desert in Morocco last July.