Discovery at Vera Rubin Ridge: Trace Fossils on Mars Barry E. DiGregorio. 230 pages, 2020. Now available on Kindle

Book Review — February 2020
by Dr. Gilbert V. Levin

Slow and carefully on the heels of his 1997 book, "Mars: the Living Planet", that strongly supported my claim that the Labeled Release experiment on the Viking Mission had detected living microorganisms on Mars in 1976, Barry DiGregorio has significantly upped the ante by laying out in great detail a case for 3.7 billion year old metazoans (multicellular creatures) on Mars. The book starts by presenting a full course in ichnology (a study of trace fossils) with glossary included. Images of many terrestrial examples are presented in microscopic and macroscopic detail. With the background established, DiGregorio proceeds to compare those images with ones sent down from NASA’s rover Curiosity. He uses many images just as beamed down by NASA, but enhances some by enlarging them and applying "photogrammetric perspective" and "a simple astronomical stacking program." The latter reveals details at different angles not discernable in the originals. There is an undeniable and startling similarity between many of the images, both raw and those enlarged by DiGregorio, and the terrestrial images he has supplied. Of particular interest are the millimeter-sized burrow-like features that could double on Earth for ancient trace fossils. Strangely, NASA has avoided doing a thorough geochemical analyses on them with Curiosity’s scientific instruments. Instead NASA has degraded them by calling them "sticks" created by abiotic processes such as salts or crystals in an evaporating lake. Even though Curiosity has found numerous rocks with manganese coatings on them, the issue of extant microbial oxidation is also avoided by NASA in its targeting and analyses. In addition, by invoking the rate of wind erosion on Mars, DiGregorio explains why manganese rock coatings made through microbial processes must be current or very nearly current for there to be any rock varnish on Mars today. In quoting correspondence with NASA officials, DiGregorio shows how the space administration is determined to avoid acknowledging the unavoidable evidence for life on Mars. The book is very likely to cause a storm of criticism about how NASA is seemingly deliberately avoiding its scientific obligations.

On the downside, too much time is spent in reviewing the Martian geography covered by Curiosity, and the author’s still evident irritation at NASA’s years-ago rejection of his and his colleagues’ life detection proposal approved by the UK Space Agency which offered to fund it. DiGregorio concludes with his persistent plea for space-faring nations to avoid forward and back contamination of other planets and Earth.

Dr. Gilbert V. Levin
Former astrobiology Principal Investigator on NASA’s twin Viking Landers – the first missions to Mars to look for life.
http://www.gillevin.com/