If life ever existed on Mars, its last outposts near the Red Planet’s surface might have been in very salty environments, new research shows.
To reconstruct how ancient Martian life might have evolved to survive the drying of Mars, scientists investigated adaptations to aridity on Earth. They found that “there is a predictable sequence of how organisms adapt to increasing dryness,” said study co-author Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University in Pullman.