In many respects stromatolites are the most intriguing fossils. Into deep time on earth, the emergence of life, and the eventual evolving of the beautiful life forms from Cambrian to modern time. A small piece of stromatolite encodes biological activity perhaps spanning thousands of years. In broad terms, stromatolites are fossil evidence of the prokaryotic life that remains today, as it has always been, the preponderance of biomass in the biosphere. For those that subscribe to the theory of the living earth, it is the prokaryotes that maintain the homeostasis of the earth, rendering the biosphere habitable for all other life. They maintain and recycle the atomic ingredients upon which proteins that "are" all life are made, including oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. We humans are, in simple terms, bags of water filled with proteins and prokaryotic bacteria (the bacteria in your body outnumber the cells in your body about 10 to 1). We humans have descended from organisms that adapted to living in a prokaryotic world, and we humans retain in our mitochondria the cellular machinery to power our cells that we inherited from the prokaryotes of deep time on earth.