A new study led by The Australian National University (ANU) has found that the building blocks of Buckingham Palace in London and many other iconic buildings were made by microbes that lived up to 200 million years ago during the Jurassic period.
The material, known as oolitic limestone, is a popular building material around the world and is almost completely made of millimetre-sized spheres of carbonate called ooids.
Co-researcher Dr Bob Burne from ANU said the new study found that ooids were made of concentric layers of mineralised microbes, debunking the popular 'snowball theory' that ooids were formed by grains rolling on the seafloor and accumulating layers of sediment.
"We have proposed a radically different explanation for the origin of ooids that explains their definitive features," said Dr Burne from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.
Different types of oolitic limestones have formed in all geological periods and have been found around the world, including in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, the Bahamas, China and at Shark Bay in Western Australia.
Dr Burne said humans had known about and used oolitic limestone since ancient times.
"Many oolitic limestones form excellent building stones,because they are strong and lightweight," he said.
"Jurassic oolite in England has been used to construct much of the City of Bath, the British Museum and St Paul's Cathedral.
Professor Murray Batchelor from ANU led an internationalteam of researchers on the study, which is published in Scientific Reports.
"Our mathematical model explains the concentric accumulation of layers, and predicts a limiting size of ooids," said Professor Batchelor from the Research School of Physics and Engineering and the Mathematical Sciences Institute at ANU.
Professor Batchelor said the research findings could help better understand the effects of past climate change.
Other researchers involved in the study were Professor Bruce Henry from the University of New South Wales, Dr Fei Li from Southwest Petroleum University in China and Professor Josef Paul from Geowissenschaftliches Zentrum der Universität in Germany.