[dekhn]

it's also mind blowing to know that there are things which really haven't changed in over a billion years, yet still do just fine. How did my bio prof say it? "Bacteria are like the race cars of the biological world. They don't win by having the best strategy, they win by rate of duplication and acquisition."

[digging]

Clearly I don't know much about race cars because that makes no sense to me, lol

[dekhn]

I should have mentioned he was an F1 fan.

[throwawaylinux]

Are there species of bacteria that are substantially unchanged in a billion years?

[dekhn]

Morphologies of cyanobacteria show that fossils from billion+ years ago show little change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite

[lazide]

No way to know for sure. But many bacteria today look very similar to what little bit of maybe fossils we might have.