Yeah, but unless it's extraterrestrial in origin I'm not sure how big a deal it is for the search for extraterrestrial life. I'm more interested in what it says about life on Earth if it did, in fact, originate here. Like the article says, every previously known lifeform on Earth shares the same building blocks, are considered to have a single common ancestor in the first monocellular organism. Unless DNA is a lot more flexible than I ever suspected (and bio is NOT my thing) this appears to be not only a separate species but a separate family of species. Whether or not it's extraterrestrial it's like carbon based life thought it was alone in a universe spanning 15 billion light years, then suddenly found a neighbor practically on the tip of its collective nose.