Mars’s Ancient Clay Holds the Same Organic Molecules That May Have Sparked Life on Earth

A large group of scientists, including astrobiologists at the University of Florida, geophysicists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a few scientists in France and Mexico, and many others, are a winner of the 2026 Gizmodo Science Fair.

The team discovered a set of seven organic molecules crucial to carbon-based life preserved within clay deposits that NASA’s Curiosity rover had sampled from the dried remains of an over 3.5-billion-year-old lakebed inside Gale Crater on Mars.

Among these molecules, a sulfur-bearing chemical, benzothiophene, had previously been detected within the cosmically ancient Murchison meteorite —a historic space rock more than 4 billion years old that’s analogous to the kinds of meteorites very likely responsible for seeding the earliest building blocks of life here on Earth.