Had this been the year 2013, I would have taught you that all extant Cyanobacteria are capable of oxygenic photosynthesis. I also would have taught you that some of the earliest fossils of life on earth are stromatolites, which are beach-ball-sized structures believed to have been formed by ancient Cyanobacteria ~3.5 billion years ago. In 2013, I would have put these two facts together and taught you that oxygenic photosynthesis must have been present by ~3.5 billion years ago and that the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred ~2.4 billion years ago when O2 from oxygenic photosynthesis started to accumulate in the atmosphere and oceans, was simply a long time (~1 billion years) in the making. However, in the last ten years we have discovered two lineages of Cyanobacteria that, much to our surprise, proved to be non-photosynthetic. The phylogenetic relationship of these two new lineages (seen in the image below) has forced us to reinterpret the timing of the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis. First, explain why the fossils and phylogeny combine to make us think that oxygenic photosynthesis might not be as ancient as we once thought. And second, why would a different pattern of phylogenetic relationshipfor example, if these two new lineages had been nested inside of the clade of previously known cyanobacterianot have caused us to reconsider our earlier thinking?.