NASA finds multi-billion-year-old 'coral' on Mars

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8 Aug, 2025

NASA's Curiosity rover has snapped black and white images of a rock on the Martian surface that looks remarkably like a piece of coral.

The strange object is in fact a small, light-colored, wind-eroded rock, which the rover found inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater on July 24 — but it looks remarkably similar to the reef-building creatures found in Earth's oceans.

A black and white picture taken with Curiosity's Remote Micro Imager — a high-resolution, telescopic camera that is mounted on the rover — and shared by NASA in a statement on Aug. 4 shows the approximately 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) rock with its intricate branches.

"Curiosity has found many rocks like this one, which were formed by ancient water combined with billions of years of sandblasting by the wind," NASA representatives wrote in the statement.

Coral-shaped rocks on Mars started forming billions of years ago, when the Red Planet still had water, according to the statement. Just like water on Earth, this water was full of dissolved minerals. It percolated through small cracks in Martian rocks, gradually depositing minerals and forming solid "veins" inside the rocks.

These veins form the strange branches of the coral-shaped object that we see in Curiosity's picture today, after millions of years of erosion by sand-laden winds wore away the rock.

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The Curiosity rover discovered what looks like coral on Mars. (Image credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory):