is <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4480097/>here

Almost saying the forbidden word
Now, twice during NASA’s news conference, scientists danced very close to this line. They had the word on their minds, it seems, and they were determined not to pronounce it. Instead, they talked around it.

With what looked to me with a gleam in his eye, project scientist Stephen Squyres gave some background about the mineralogy in the crater that Opportunity had done its exploring of the bedrock layers.

"What kind of rocks preserve signs of ancient life?” he mused. “Minerals that precipitated from water. They can trap the evidence for that." And the minerals at Opportunity's site are exactly such minerals, the results indicate.

MIT’s Dr. John Grotzinger, in response to a question, cautioned that even on Earth, fossils were very rare in ancient rocks. But he too mentioned off-hand that "these minerals [provide] ideal candidates to be time capsules, to preserve something that was there."

“Fossils are rare in rocks from the era before multicellular life,” a NASA scientist explained to me privately, agreeing that microorganisms would be very difficult to ever find. “But larger fossils are fairly common in more recent strata. If Mars ever had macroscopic life, whether truly multicellular or in the form of large colonies like stromatolytes, fossils would be discoverable with a reasonable search.”

I don't think these things can all be waved away as "anomalist garbage" or "eye-squinting and wishing" - even if the features pointed out are not fossils, they are unusual enough to warrant further thought and some hypotheses as to their formation.

And if even one of them really is a fossil (and there is no real evidence that I've seen that proves they cannot be) then Opportunity really hit a jackpot.