  Deep surveys in many wavebands have shown that the rate at which stars were
forming was at least a factor of 10 higher at z > 1 than today. Heavy elements
(metals) are produced by stars, and the star formation history deduced by these
surveys implies that a significant fraction of metals in the universe today
should already exist at z~2-3. However, only 10% of the total metals expected
to exist at this epoch have so far been accounted for (in DLAs and the Lyman
forest). In this paper, we use the results of submillimetre surveys of the
local and high redshift universe to show that there was much more dust in
galaxies in the past. We find that a large proportion of the missing metals are
traced by this dust, bringing the metals implied from the star formation
history and observations into agreement. We also show that the observed
distribution of dust masses at high redshift can be reproduced remarkably well
by a simple model for the evolution of dust in spheroids, suggesting that the
descendants of the dusty galaxies found in the deep submm surveys are the
relatively dust-free spiral bulges and ellipticals in the universe today.
